People have been speaking a lot about the memory of technology recently - much of it stemming from the recent comments by Lynne Brindley, the head of the British Library, who said that we need to work harder to preserve our digital memories.

Although, scandalously, there was no mention of the Internet Archive in there, Brindley hit on a truth - our lives are better recorded than ever, but all that information is more easily lost because we track it in files and formats that we may no longer be able to understand in just a couple of years.

So the question remains: how do we make sure we can recover our digital lives at an unspecified point in the future? Yeah, you could translate it from one format to another or assiduously keep everything backwards-compatible. But some researchers in Portsmouth thing they've come up with a better answer - an emulator to end all emulators.

Nearly €1m has been given to the faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries researchers to help create software that can look back in time and capture the workings of old computers, files, software and technologies. They also hope to be able to future-proof the software so every single piece of data and software created can be encoded to be read by newer, faster, better computers in the future.

This Rosetta Stone for the digital world, they say, could help people recover files from floppy disks, old computers and archaic machines (and the internet too, I suppose) forevermore. Rather than running a single emulator, they hope to code a single contraption that can translate whatever it finds into something your computer can understand.

It's part of a €4m EU project which wants to help preserve modern life for future generations: a sort of digi-cultural archaeology that is likely to get more important as the years go by.

I'd like to think this is the silver bullet for our memories, but it's also a Sisyphean task - the never-ending attempt to emulate everything for everyone (and, of course, retain working machines that can read those old floppies, too).

All I know is that things were a lot simpler when all we did was scratch pictures on the walls of caves.