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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."
Domesday, not doomsday...BIG difference. Domesday compiled basically a census of 'who's who' in England. Doomsday means we all go boom or something. That's sort of an important thing to get right.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
While I believe the main topic deals with the lack of hardware to read the laserdisk, the same applies to any document written today. Will there exist tools in 'n' years that will read Word documents written 5 years ago?
This is exactly why Don Knuth developed TeX. He was concerned about the life expectancy of documents such as this.
His idea was to write your documents in plain text (the lowest common denominator) and use a processor to convert them to whatever format you need 'today': postscript, html, or whatever.
It may not be as sexy as WYSIWYG, but it will *always* work.
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.
If anyone was like me and had know idea what this book is check here:
www.domesdaybook.co.uk
Sorry, I posted this once already and typoed the link.
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You don't read the paper often, do you? Hell, both AP and Reuters kept referring to the anthrax virus - something that I have never heard of despite many years of microbiology. The anthrax bacteria, yes... but a virus? Wow.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The ananova story is a strangely stilted summary of this Observer story
Actually, "Domesday" IS an old spelling of "Doomsday" (and the book was also referred to as Domesdei). It referred to the fact that the census was both unavoidable (EVERYONE was examined), and a final verdict--in other words, if the Domesday book said that Hugh de Montfort owned the castle at Saltwood (which, if anyone cares, he did), then he had the full weight of the law behind him. Any brothers or cousins who came forth to dispute that would, in theory, be ignored.
The humor of the title probably wasn't appreciated by many of the people chronicled in it, as the study was carried out on the orders of William I, who had just conquered them. It was, in many ways, an inventory of what he had just gained by beating the Saxons and taking their lands.
A computer and network geek who seems to go by the name of markl and nothing else has some fascinating pages on the Domesday Project. He even seems to have some movie clips but I have not looked at them.
It's just an archaic spelling of the same word, though I guess it's a fair point that some non-British readers may not have heard of the Domesday Book. The name was a deliberate allusion to the census as something akin to the final judgement that was supposed to follow the second coming of the messiah.
I worked on a digital archive project at a library research institiute (OCLC). Digital archives are a royal pain. You first have to transfer the analog material to digital. Doable, but costly. Then you have to have a way of indexing it. And remember, we need an index scheme that can handle poetry, baseball cards, and music scores as well as gov't docs and books. Then you need to be able to store it. Finally, there is retrieval and display.
Now make it all last a zillion or two years. Any digital media we have today (tape, cd, etc.) might last 20 years if you are lucky. Even if you built a special purpose computer to store it, the silicon chips themselves might last only 20 years before they break down. If you can find a media that lasts, then you have to guarantee that the format will be readable. This requires that you archive the software that reads the format and perhaps the OS that the software runs on.
A digital library also loses a lot as well. If we archive the Domesday Book and lose the original, we have lost any opportunity to learn about the paper and ink technology of the original copy.
There is a branch of Library and Information Sciences that studies these problems. There have also been a couple of ACM CACM issues devoted to some of this.
FreeSpeech.org
TeX is not WYSIWYG. TeX handles kanji, kana, arabic scripts, cyrillic letters, etc. just fine including things like line position and direction. It may store the document as ASCII but that doesn't mean your editor has to show it to you that way. TeX also handles equations and charts pretty well too. There's a reason it's the most popular format for composing scientific publications.
The problem with paper is that only highly specific types of paper are all that durable over many years. Most normal kinds of paper that you typically see have a high acid content, which causes them to yellow and then disintegrate with age. Your average paperback book will start to crumble in a few decades or so, most newspapers even earlier. I have quite a few paperbacks that are about 20 years old (which is when I started buying my own books), and they have definitely started to yellow and turn brittle even though they have been stored in a dry, clean, reasonably climate-controlled place (i.e. my living room).
Acid-free paper can also deteriorate over time, especially if handled a lot (since sweat from fingers also contains acids and bacteria) or just exposed to the air (which is also slightly acidic in normal circumstances, especially if the air is at all polluted), and also depending on the kind of inks used. Soy inks, which are increasingly popular with mass-printed media, may decay or fade over time (though they have not been in use long enough to know for sure); offset inks can also turn acidic if not properly mixed and/or discolor over time.
So it's not as simple as just "printing on paper". You need to use specially-produced acid-free (slightly alkaline) paper; use a non-acidic ink with a chemically stable pigment; and store it in climate-controlled conditions, where it can't be handled or even breathed upon.
Ironically, parchment and soot ink have proven remarkably stable over time. So long as parchment books were not stored in overly bad conditions (too damp or in polluted air), they held up for many hundreds of years with no trouble.
In a way, this story comes as no surprise to anyone who's interested in calligraphy and medieval history -- take a look at the books in museums, like the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Museum or the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin, and they look amazingly bright and fresh some 1300 years after they were made.
Those monks wanted to write for a very long posterity, and stumbled on just the way to do it -- sheepskins (vellum) and ink out of bone black.
If you're interested in medieval writing materials, check out these pages:
Ink Recipes
Handmade Paper -- Archival Paper
Medieval Manuscripts
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
This is getting more than a little nitpicky, I know, but here's the authoritative version:
Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English glosses 'dom' as 'judgment' and 'dæg' as 'day' ('dæg' being just the pre-invasion West Saxon spelling of 'day'). '-es' in 'domes' is just the genetive singular inflection for masculine nouns. So "Judgment's Day" is the closest you'll get. 'Domdæg' is actually the original (10th century West Saxon) Old English term, literally translating as "judgment day", in the Mitchell and Robinson text.
A caveat: Because the word 'Domesday' was written post-invasion, it's technically Middle English, but comes directly on the heals of the Old English period and so has more to do with King Ælfred's language than Chaucer's.
I don't think that happened. Schools in the UK used BBC Micros a lot (the BBC name helped), including Masters. Never seen a domesday machine at a school. (Note to self: Nick some of the BBC micros in the music room stock cuboard ;) )
There was one at the science museum in Birmingham, but that closed a couple of years ago, I don't know what happened to the machine. Its either in storage, or I think a new more edutainmenty museum opened at millenium point, so it might be there.
Of course, you do have the problem of transferring the data from a BBC Micro to a PC (probably via an Acorn Archimedies or something), and data formats.
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Last time I was there, the Science Museum in London had a working setup. All they have to do is figure how to hook it up to a CD burner and problem solved
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