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."
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
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.
Does it really matter if the disks are unreadable? If the data wasn't important enough that somebody didn't say, "hey, we need to transfer this stuff to new media," then maybe it's not such a big deal. At a minimum, I presume that it means that the data wasn't being used by anyone, or they'd have noticed that it was about to become unavailable.
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.
"We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC."
I can still access WordPerfect files from an old home computer from 1987. That computer still has a floppy drive which I can write files to. It still has the capability of connecting a null modem up to it for file transfer. Granted, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's still accessible.
There HAVE to be some laserdisc readers someplace in the UK that can read this. The point they're probably making is 'be wary of putting too much faith in technology'. That's a good attitude to have, but simply putting a bit more thought into keeping the data available in multiple formats would help ensure no loss of access. Hell, this was a multimillion pound project - they couldn't burn any of this to conventional CDs too? Yes, you couldn't run out to Dixon's or BestBuy and get a CD burner for $100 like today, but I'd have thought a bit more technology was available to a multimillion pound project.
"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. "
Yes, the desktops might, but the data won't. Put the data in normal, documented data formats, and put them on regular drives, CDs, ZIP disks, DVD, whatever. Don't put all your digital eggs in one basket, should be the lesson. OR, simply have a technology upgrade plan in place for data that is important enough to outlive the media on which it is contained. Data that was worth millions of pounds at one time should merit a stipend of a few thousand pounds a year to keep it accessible.
creation science book
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?
Quite right. I submitted the story, and it looks my typing habits have been corrupted by too many iD games....
Cheers,
Ian
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.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
From that article:
Betamax video players, 8in and 5in computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 3in disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible.
Needless to say, the term redundant simply means that using standard equipment you'd have problems reading this data. But specialist media recovery firms maintain old machines and there are several that will convert your old 3-inch Amstrad disks or that Betamax wedding recording, for a fee.
The Domesday 1986 disks are undoubtedly difficult to access without specialist equipment, and that's the real problem--eventually any nascent technology will become obsolete and data will be lost. Eventually it will no longer be economic for data recovery companies to maintain their obsolete machines.
Paul Wheatley: "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."
If they have any sense they'll store most of it on fiche and store that in good conditions.
Eventually we will move on from this format. I have about 40 movies in DVD format, and it'll probably eventually beat out my VHS collection (at ~700).
I'm hoping that once we move on to yet another larger format that there are some countries free enough that I can download a program that will allow me to move the DVDs to the new format.
Oxidization also bothers me.
-no broken link
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
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.
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.
Think about it. Pick a very popular recent source of art.. say, the Beatles. How many formats is their work stored in? In how many languages? Really, this is a good argument for Peer-to-Peer media sharing systems. It takes media that society considers important and replicates and archives it all over the world..
Much how popular folk songs have been passed from generation to generation via spoken or sung words, current media is being passed around the globe and stored on everything from hardcopy to harddrives to optical media.
The only information we have to worry about losing is that which is forgotten by the masses.. for it is in danger of not being replicated and passed around.
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.
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
Well, then you design some standard way to represent scientific symbols and equations with ASCII phrases. Given the wide use of TeX among scientists and mathemeticians, I would say this is a solved problem.
However, I agree with your point about foreign languages.
I had a desktop computer 15 years ago. I can still read the media from it. Granted, 5 1/4 floppy drivess aren't exactly sold new in stores anymore, but I guarantee I can still find one if I need to. I worry more about the media itself being unreadable due to age rather than not having the required equipment to read it.
:)
Is it really such a difficult project to simply upgrade your digital storage as time goes on? Even though people might see this as a waste of time, consider your savings in storage. Converting old media, especially old magnetic tapes (think nasa) to newer, longer lasting, and SMALLER media formats, just makes sense. Nasa isnt' going to suddenly quit collecting data, its going to continue. The savings in physical storage space alone would make it worth the effort. The fact that this information will then continue to be accessible for generations to come is just a benifitial side effect.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
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.
It's even more than cultural work. Scientific work can be lost. Just because something is unimportant now, doesn't mean that it won't be in the future.
. htm
Take the case of the Aloutte satellite that was launched in 1967.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/8434/essay
It collected tons of information about the ionosphere and stored that information on now obsolette tape. At the time, the information was processed and condensed and placed in an archive.
There are tonnes and tonnes of these tapes. Twenty years later, historical information on the o-zone layer became important. Since the original Aloutte researchers weren't looking for o-zone data, they never bothered to analyze that data. The only way to do that is to go to the original tapes.
The problem is, only a few machines can read these tapes and since the tape readers are *extremely* slow by todays standards, it will take years to transfer all that information to CD. What's worse is that some of the tapes are already worn out, so a good deal of information will be lost.
Just imagine what would have happened if the ancient greeks were so advanced that they stored all their information on CDs. We'd never get out of the dark ages, because people lost interest in preserving knowledge while Rome was crumbling.
All of Aristotle, Euclid, and other scientist's work would be on CDs that no-one knew how to read. No-one would even know what the CDs were for. They'd get as much respect as AOL CD, being used as frisbees, placemats, decorations, or just thrown in the trash.
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
ASCII's all well and good, but not everyone uses the roman alphabet.
Then try UTF-8, which is also plain-text, and shows no signs of being obsoleted. (The Unicode Consortium is honestly trying for a standard to last a thousand years, or at least as long as we use digital computers.)
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
You may not be able to display them, but you can store them in ASCII. For long term data storage, it's more important that they be recreatable with a little work than they be instantly displayable.
And am I the only person fed up of getting apostrophes converted to little boxes when put through various emailers?
Then stop using a proprietary encoding. If you used an encoding that was an open standard, like ASCII or Latin 1, then it would get through without problem. If you use a Windows codepage, well, then of course other people will have problems displaying it correctly. When you use a media proprietary to one company, like Betamax or DivX or CP1252, then you will have problems working with everyone else.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
A team of programmers including a 15-yr old broke the DVD encryption within a few years - I am sure that humans 10k+ years from now will be able to replicate that same type of work!
However, said team had some idea of the purpose behind that shiny silver disk, and some idea of what the plaintext should look like.
Consider 12000 CE.
You're an archaeologist, and you find a shiny silvery disk approximately 10 flurburbs in diameter. What is it for? It has some markings on one side that your specialist in dead languages tells you says, "Porky's 2: The Next Day". The other side apparently functions as a diffraction grating.
Now what?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
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
ipv6 is my vpn
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
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"