BBC Domesday Project
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The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence.
A new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. This included all the information from the original survey plus modern spellings of the place names, maps, and many color photos, video and 'virtual walks'. Over 1 million people participated in the project, with thousands of school children contributing material.
The project was stored on adapted laserdiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analog video and still pictures, but also digital data. To view the discs, an Acorn BBC Master expanded with an SCSI controller and additional coprocessor controlled a Philips "Domesday Player", an adapted laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC's keyboard and a trackball. The software for the project was written in BCPL to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might.
The project was split over two laserdiscs:
- The Community Disc contained personal reflections on life in Britain and is navigated on a geographic map of Britain. The entire country was divided into blocks that were 4km wide by 3km tall, based on Ordnance Survey grid references. Each block contained at least 3 photographs and a number of short reflections on life in that area.
- The National Disc contained more varied material, including all data from the 1981 census and virtual reality-like walkarounds. The material was stored in a hierarchy and could be browsed by walking around a virtual art gallery, clicking on the pictures on the wall, or walking through doors in the gallery to enter the VR walkarounds.
In 2002, there were great fears that the disc would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare (and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer). However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between Leeds University and University of Michigan) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation techniques.
In collaboration with the National Archives (UK), a new updated version (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/research/rescue.htm) of the disc was created that runs on a Windows PC. Although not commercially available, it is possible to access a terminal running the new version at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, Surrey.
External links
- National Archives, information on Domesday Disc project (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/preservation/research/rescue.htm)
- Domesday Project information - describing current status (http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html)
- CAMiLEON Project homepage (http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/index.html)
- More on CAMiLEON (http://www.iconbar.com/news/features/camileon.html)