I thought we’d dip into the technology file today and look at some old and new tech stuff. If you’re a girl, do you remember that talking doll from your childhood? Well, it turns out that talking dolls go back a lot further than your childhood. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. have recovered sound from a ring-shaped cylinder phonograph record made of solid tin that historians believe is the earliest surviving talking doll record. Phonograph inventor Thomas Edison made the record in 1888 in West Orange, N.J.

On the recording, an unidentified woman recites one verse of the nursery rhyme "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." The voice captured on the recording has been unheard since Edison's lifetime, and it represents a significant milestone in the early history of recorded sound technology.

The record cylinder is no longer round and it couldn’t be played using conventional methods. The Berkeley scientists used a three-dimensional optical device to create a digital model of the cylinder’s surface and they recovered all but the first syllable of the first word of the recording.

Thomas Edison was searching for a market for his phonograph in 1888 and he decided that talking dolls were the way to go. Since he couldn’t duplicate his sound recordings, he hired women with suitable voices to make as many records as he thought would be needed once his talking dolls were put on the market. This is probably the first time people were employed to do sound recording, so these unnamed women may have been the world's first professional recording artists. But they never received the recognition they deserved.

Edison placed his first talking doll on the market in 1890. By that time, he’d switched to using records made from wax instead of tin. Unfortunately, the dolls were a commercial flop because they broke too easily, mainly because the records were made of wax instead of tin. No one knows why Edison switched from tin to wax records for the talking doll.

So we know what happened to a sound recording that’s more than 120 years old, but here’s a question for you: What’s going to happen to the data in your computer in 120 years? An old-school alternative to digital storage may save us from information loss as technology changes and today's state-of-the-art devices become tomorrow's museum pieces.

We’ve all seen it. If you didn’t remove grandma’s picture from that 5 1/4 floppy disc you had it stored on, it’s toast. Your movies on VHS? Ditto for the most part. Reams of data from the Moon landings? Well, maybe. And when they stop using CDs in five or 10 years? What then?

There are always books and printed photos. They don’t go bad (at least not with the speed of digital data). So, what are we to do? German scientists suggest that microfilm, the format beloved of spy fiction, may be the way to go for "offline" storage in terms of cost, stability and technology independence.

Microfilm doesn’t require frequent technology updates, and future generations can access the information by scanning the microfilm into whatever system they’re currently using and applying optical character recognition to decode the data.

You don’t need tapes, spinning discs or even electronic hardware to store microfilm. You just need a dry, temperature-controlled closet or even just a hermetically sealed box. Sounds like a plan to me!