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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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