Slashdot Mirror
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."
I was about 10 at the time, and myself and about 3 schoolfriends survayed places like Westmarsh in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. It was quite goog really. I think it was organsied by the childrens TV programme "Blue Peter" or something. Obviously a waste of time retrospect, but still fun for a ten year old.
They should have used microdots or long lived microfilm, or really anything other then electronic media. For longevity sadly uou need something tangible.
...in this comment.
With more and more of our culture being created and stored exclusively on digital media, there is a real danger that future generations may have little, or even nothing, to tell them what our lives were like, because everything we've left behind is inaccessible.
(BTW, this particular work is not the "Doomsday" book, it's the "Domesday Book," a comprehensive survey and ledger of the lands and holdings of King William in the 11th century.)
DennyK
I thought the original goal of the doomsday project was to allow every school in the UK to have a copy. So there should be a BBC Master hooked up to a laserdisc player in almost every school ?
I wonder would happen to a newspaper editor that let one blatant error slide each day?
What?
The Domesday Book on laserdisk was pretty neat; you could look up pertinent details for your local area, and it formed the basis of a lot of good history projects. IIRC, it had some primitive hypertext facilities.
I'm absolutely positive that this could be resurrected if needs-be. Enough copies of this went out to schools that finding a readable laserdisk shouldn't be a problem, and there has to be a working reader somewhere. I seem to remember that the data wasn't in any particularly obscure format, so mounting it on a BBC Master and sending it to a different machine shouldn't be too difficult.
If needs be, one could probably export the whole thing and mount it via a hacked BeebEm.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
Look around at what we have that will last 10,000 years... Nearly nothing will last that long. All the plastic, all the books, all the concrete will be dust. Metals will all corrode away to nothing. Even if a DVD would last that long, the encryption in it would prevent it from being read. Imagine if egyption hyroglifics had been encrypted too. We would know nothing about them at all. And most source code and data is compressed, can you imagine trying to figure out LZW compression without knowing anything about it.
We only build things to last 100 years at most anymore. And most things get torn down long before that. The only thing we make that lasts longer than that is our toxic waste.
Can you imagine how suprised a future archielogist will be when they dig into some radioactive waste that is still active in 10,000 years? Lethally suprised. *L* Maybe there will be legends of curses on people who dig in ancient sites? Kind of like the curse of the mummy.
There may have been civilizations before that were just as advanced as our own. When they collapsed they may have simply vanished with nary a trace in just a couple of thousand years. It isn't as hard as you think. A 1 mile wide asteroid hits the earth, dust obscures the sun for a few years so that all the plants die and the people fight and die for the few remaining scraps of food.
I often wonder if maybe the few real UFO's that are seen and the aliens that we hear about are visitors from space colonies that these previous civilizations managed to place on the moon or in the asteroid belt. If they aren't all the feverored imaginings of half crazy people.
-- Never make a general statement.
... no kidding.
Digital storage *is* perfectly viable. But digital storage 15 years ago and digital storage today would be like comparing accountancy before Arabic numerals and after.
Today reliability, speed and capacity is what, 1000 times greater? No more need for weird compression techniques -- plain text (or TeX) documents can be stored. Viciously *uncompressed* graphics, too.
With 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, surely we can task a few of 'em with keeping the media current.
(Also, to be pedantic: Optical media are disCs, magnetic media are disKs.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not as far as I know. William I was an extremely brutal invader, and after the Sack of Yorkshire in the early 1080s (1082?) his Doomsday book assed the value of Yorkshire to be only 5 shillings - 4 ounces of silver in other words. The invasion of England was ultimately a business venture for the feudal Normansand he needed to know just how much money he could extract from his new estate, as subdivided by his barons etc. Doomsday it was. Now the entire Anglo-Saxon land ownship sysytem was overthrown, people were precisely put into catagories such as villain (i.e. land-owning peasent), tenent (renting land), serf (land-tied part-slave, part renter), and slave. The who period was a bloody disaster for the English, basically to feed the Norman-French war machine. That was why the book was called the Doomsday book as I understood it. I think Domesday is just an archaic spelling meaning the same thing.
do we realy want the future to think that porn was concidered important. gee, it's replicated in all formats all over the world
Well, it is considered important by a lot of people, and given how widespread it is, has definately made a major impact on our culture. Like it or not, that's a part of history and should be recorded as such.
Infact it did mean day of judgement, just not by G-d but by the King and his tax collectors. William the Bastard (AKA William of Normandy) had just taken over England, and he wanted to know what he had and more importantly how much it should pay in taxes. It historicly a very interesting document, and you probably can find large parts of it on the web. In both the original Latin and in Modern English.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Interestingly enough, this is similar to the way most word-processing documents are written on the BeOS.
The document is just plain text, but all of the formatting is stored as metadata.
The upshot, is that unlike most word processing documents, they are clearly readable with simple text editors. Even if you edit the document in a simple text editor, the formatting will remain coherent the next time the document is viewed in a word processor.
Of course this isn't as robust as TeX or such, because it relies on the metadata storing capabilities of the filesystem, and you may be limiting yourself to the BeFS (though there is no reason why NTFS or any filesystem like perhaps XFS or ReiserFS when taking advantage of Linux's VFS couldn't have similar functionality.) Even then , if you were to copy the document to another less enabled filesystem, you would only lose advanced formatting information. The body of text would still be fully useable.
-castlan
The Observer is the original source of this article. The linked version is a reshash of that, but the Observer is more informative.
They had the original Domesday book on display at the White Tower for the millenial celebration.
I stood in line for 30 minutes so I could see it, and I can assure you it is not perfectly useable. First of all you have to know Latin and how to read really bad handwriting.
You're also not allowed to take pictures of it, and if you try to do that or even touch the book these guys with guns point them at you and say "Don't you dare."
I'd have better chance at decrypting DVDs, or reading the Windows source code than using the original Domesday book.
Exactly how big would an archive that takes "tonnes and tonnes of these tapes" be if it were put onto paper? How much would it cost to store? Do you think people would still pay to store it for 20 years if they did not need it?
How "extremely slow by todays standards" are human beings reading paper? My guess would be hundreds of times slower than the most obsolete tape reader.
There can't be many /.ers who got their hands on this thing, but I did. It was a big ol' honking LD, silver thing the size of an LP, with a big box to play it. It had a beautiful UI where you could click on the map and zoom & move around in in a totally intuitive way. When you got down real close to a town or neighborhood, the explanatory text was all written by fifth-graders in a set of school projects - it was flat and unstylish but very vivid. It was so beautiful that I literally got tears in my eyes the first time I used it.
Lest one thinks books are a safe repository of knowledge, do not forget that even these can easily be lost in time. Petrarch (1304-1374) travelled Europe searching libraries and monasteries gathering works that were molding away. Many of Cicero's works were saved by him, hand copied from moldy disintegrating manuscripts that might not have lasted another generation. Many ancient Latin works that helped pave the way to the Renaissance were rediscovered by him forgotten in various monastery libraries.
When he went to the library of Monte Cassino he found many rare and then unknown works, but pages were missing from many of the books, and many had strips torn from their pages. He discovered that the monks had been taking pages of the books to make into psalters and turning strips into amulets to sell.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.