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1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival

Posted by timothy on from the word-to-the-printed-word dept.

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."

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  1. I have a different perspective by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Here's what I think: An electronic version of the Domesday Book compiled in 1986 is now unreadable. The computers needed to read the discs of the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project are now obsolete. While the original Domesday Book compiled in 1086 is in fine condition in the Public Record Office, Kew. The information stored on the laser discs which is the equivalent of several sets of encyclopedia's is now impossible to access, reports The Observer. "It is ironic but the 15-year-old version is unreadable, while the ancient one is still in perfectly usable," said computer expert Paul Wheatley. "We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC." He has now started work on Camileon, a program aimed at recovering the data on the Domesday discs. "We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs and we are confident we will eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text," he said. "Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."