1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival

mccalli writes :"Thought people might find this amusing. In 1986, the UK compiled an electronic domesday book. They used BBC Master computers to do it, and the result was put on laserdisc. I actually used this project whilst at school. This article states that nothing can now read these merely 15-year old discs. The original, written approx. 1086, is still doing fine thank you very much." Sounds like a good candidate for Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. (Speaking of Sterling, the "graying cyberpunk" has an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle on the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference called "Information Wants to be Worthless" -- thanks to reader ag3n7.) Update: 03/03 19:38 GMT by T : That's "domesday" not "doomsday."

Comments

Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII

[OsamaBinLager]

Yes. It's called 'XML.'

Re:This is exactly what I was talking about..

[mccalli]

(BTW, this particular work is not the "Doomsday" book, it's the "Domesday Book,"

Quite right. I submitted the story, and it looks my typing habits have been corrupted by too many iD games....

Cheers,
Ian

Books can't be Slashdotted!

[breon.halling]

From http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk:

Unfortunately, due to server difficulties The Domesday Book Online has been unavailable for a short time.

The original book even outlasted the online version! ;)

Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII

[LordNimon]

Your mistake, which is something that apparently happens to a lot of people, is that when you discarded the hardware used to read your electronic data, you did not transfer that data to a new medium. You simply discarded the hardware and forgot about the data. There's nothing suprising about this. It would be like selling your house and forgetting to move your furniture out of it, and then moving into a new house and saying, "Damn! I forgot the furniture, and now the owners of my old house have it!".

OT [Re:Aren't laserdiscs analog?]

[Derwen]

My understanding is that laserdiscs are analog media,

But it's the BBC, old boy, they'd be analogue
- Derwen

Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY

[Afrosheen]

"It may not be perfect, but at least it's on the street."

Isn't that Microsoft's slogan? I smell some trademark infringement here...

Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII

[horza]

"We'll need to find a storage medium that can be decoded by the one engine that will not fade for a long time; The Human Brain.

Can you imagine spell-checking your document only for the computer to stop at a word and bring up a box saying, "Oh I know this one... it's on the tip of my tongue... no, don't tell me..."

Seriously though, as long as the media doesn't deteriorate we can always reverse-engineer to get the data back if it's really important.

Phillip.

Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye

[statusbar]

I was thinking this very thought the last time that I was in Las Vegas. After an armageddon or something, all data of our civilization would be lost. The nevada sand storms would cover and preserve the Luxor hotel. The future civilization would dig and find the huge pyramid. What would they think went on there? It must have been some sort of religous gathering place for the slaves. And what of the significance of the Sphinx in front of the Luxor? Is it pointing to the other, slightly older Sphinx in what used to be Egypt? This one group of people must have migrated via a frozen channel or something. Or maybe they had aliens helping! What else could explain it? There is no evidence that this ancient civilization had any other high technology. { it is all dust now }

hehehe

Encrypted computer data will lead us into a new dark age of information if people are stupid and decide to archive books and artwork digitally and destroy the originals. Tablets and oil paintings are more effective to document history.

--Jeff