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Sorry an 'l' went missing at the end of that reference http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html

The BBC Domesday project in 1986, see http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.htm used doors as a paradigm to move between the different applications.

Interestingly the BBC ran a project in 1986 to celebrate the 900th birthday of the original Doomsday project. The system comprised of 12 inch laserdisks, and the hardware needed to read them. Today, only 20 years later, you'd be hard pressed to find any way of reading those disks without the orignal hardware. Unlike the original 900 year old copy... http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html

"Still, it's a bit like the ridiculous argument that some day we won't be able to read CD-ROMs, because the technology will have advanced so far, the hardware will no longer exist."

Interesting that the original domesday book is still useful for territorial disputes almost a thousand years after it was written, but that the domesday project, a modern equivalent on laserdisk is no longer readable roughly 20 years after introduction.

Even though later on, an effort was made to port to the PC it reminds us just how ephemeral modern information is. If a year is a long time in politics, a decade is an eternity in computing tech.

Open standards (and not closed or proprietary document formats) are the only weapon we have against a "digital dark ages" descending on us. There are already files I have from my early computing days (written to an Exabyte tape in a non-standard dump-format) that I can't read. My PhD thesis is out-of-bounds in digital form, unless I get a used DECstation from ebay...

Just food for thought...

The infrared filter blocks out all light except the low infra-red frequencies (anything below 620nm) Some filters can also mask out the IR frequencies above 950nm. This allows you to photograph scenery with deep levels of contrast, but not do thermal imaging.

I don't remember if it was the LoC, BBC, PBS, or who (was some big archive, tho) who had this pile of old media that they had a hell of a time finding anything to read.

Perhaps you are thinking of the Domesday Project in the UK in the eighties, in which the BBC collaborated with schools to create a modern version of the original Domesday book created in the twenty years after 1066 (William the Conqueror wanted a full audit of what he had won). It was a huge project, and used laser discs to store the vast (for the time) amounts of data. The irony came less than twenty years later, when they were scrambling to find hardware that could still read the discs, so that it could be re-archived before the discs degraded. Meanwhile, the original Domesday Book, on paper, is still as legible as it was when it was created almost a thousand years ago.

One common criticism of the use of vellum is that of animal cruelty, although it's worth noting that the goatskin used is a by-product of the leather industry, and comes from goats that had already been slaughtered to make, say, shoes.

I was glad to hear that this latest attempt at pointless `modernisation' (for the sake of appearing `modern' rather than for any deeper and more sensible reasons) was defeated. Not least because it's really cool to be able to say ``This is actually an Act of Parliament from the 16th century, and that's actually Henry VIII's signature - not a photocopy, not a JPEG, but the real thing.''

A related matter concerns the increasing prevalence of digital photography. As this BBC News article explains, digital photography may cause problems for future generations of local or family historians. Proper (printed) photographs tend to get stored away in shoeboxes in attics, and are still more-or-less as legible after a hundred years as they were when they were taken. Whereas an entire collection of digital photographs can be wiped out by one hard-disk failure.

Or maybe in fifty years' time nobody'll know how to display a JPEG. Somewhere I've got a tape with the very first program I wrote, recorded on it. It was a simple bullseye game for the Video Genie II (a TRS80 clone) - it wasn't particularly sophisticated by general standards, but not at all bad for an eight-year-old kid. I have no means of retrieving it on any of the small menagerie of computers currently in my house.

Another, related, example: in the mid-1980s a (for the time, pretty damned impressive) multimedia project was launched - the Domesday Project. This was a laserdisc containing digital reproductions of the original 11th-century Domesday Book itself (a census survey of the entirety of England ordered by William I) together with (I think) the 1981 national census data. All very innovative (albeit rather a costly system) but ironically, 15 years on, the laserdiscs are not readable by current technology - but the original 900-odd-year-old Domesday Book itself still is.

I guess the point is that it's all very well saying ``this media is guaranteed to last for fifty years'' (although personally I'd be happier with something that'll last several hundred) but also you have to guarantee that the data format itself is going to remain readily decodeable. This is not a problem for 1000-year-old documents on vellum (as long as your Latin or Norman French is ok, and you've done a basic course in paleography).

nicholas

I think the person who wrote that article needs to have a look at this site - it seems to know more about it than them.

I used the system at the Science Museum, London and was very impressed since I had read a lot about it but never used it. My parents dragged me away before I got too stuck in! :-(

Gareth

The Domesday Disc (note spelling) was a double-sided videodisk that ran into a modified videodisk drive attached to a likewise modified BBC Master, a rather nice 6502-based microcomputer. The Master's video output went through the videodisk player. What happened was the client software told the player to display a particular frame, and the Master would overlay graphics on top of it. There was also a mechanism for reading raw data from the audio portion of the videodisk. It was really quite simple (but horribly expensive).

I would have thought that a conventional computer Laserdisk player would be able to get all the data off.

A few discs were made for the system, but the Domesday Disc was the only one that was mass produced. If you're interested, there's lots of information on the Domesday Project page.