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Digital Domesday Rescued By Emulation
eefsee writes "The BBC announced that the Digital Domesday project which had become unusable has now been revived thanks to the successful emulation of a 1980's era Acorn computer. Folks at Leeds University and University of Michigan did the emulation work. This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage. Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."
Whew... glad I read that wrong.
From the linked BBC article:
BBC Micro was a popular computer in the 1980s (emphasis mine)
So which one is it?
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Good job they're not a US company, otherwise they'd be forced to sue themselves under the DMCA.
Can you play UT2003 on the Doomsday Book?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
How do the English pronounce this: Domesday ???
Run out of memory, pehaps, but never decay.
Pardon my ignorance, but don't they mean "doomsday", and what was the "domesday book of 1086"?
See? This is why we need DRM. If there were proper DRM going on then of course it would have been recoverable! We would just need the exact system(nope, can't change the processor, or the video card, or the hard driver) in order to recover it!
See, doesn't DRM help us all?
</sarcasm>
Students at Leeds University (where I am at the computer science department) now have 2 new frisbees. Highly dangerous, they are likely to take one's head off.
Meanwhile, the rest of us doing Informatics their will probably be press ganged into making some sense out of the data. Who can make any sense of how Britain was in the 80s? Not I my friends.
With the limited amount of technology they had a millenium ago, they've STILL got records of these people! Imagine what they'll have on you in a thousand years!
I'm curious as to whether this is technically legal under the DMCA. We all know that emulation is almost always in violation of intellectual property laws (doubly so when it is used to steal video games, as in MAME, Stella, and WINE), and I don't know why this would be any different. The Acorn ROM is probably proprietary. I'd hate to see such a valuable educational resource be marred by the taint of theft. Why don't we just start over and do it right rather than make up for our past errors by stealing?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
how badly DRM driven by capitalist proprietory concerns conflicts so inimically with culture, history and knowledge.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Didn't they just save one of those acorn computers? I mean the voltage hasn't changed, so all they had to do was brong that pc out of retirement, find a way to hook it up to a 486 and transfer the files...or is it more complicated than that?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
It will be pretty crazy in many years to come to 'preserve our digital heritage'... Think of all the emulation that will be needed over time.
I don't understand why you would need to emulate everything though, shouldnt it be the data that actually counts?
About keeping two or three of whatever devices are used to read the media? Or has anybody ever heard of schematics?.
I mean sheesh, put your data on a few CD-ROM's, invest in a few cheapie PC's with readers and you're set. I still have a doorstop PCXT around somewhere, and can easily get data off any 180K floppies if need be.
And they could find a laser disk reader on EBAY if need be, there are 9 on ther right now.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
It's indeed a good idea - the original hardware can still be kept as a museum piece (the two "indestructible discs", for example), but everybody would be able to access the content via emulation.
I hope that they also make the content available online and that they donate the source and content to the different websites that would be interested (e.g. Project Gutenberg for the text, and emulator websites for the program).
The ENIAC Demo Competition
The BBC Micro (known as 'The Beeb'...) was manufactured by Acorn (who were very successful with it on the UK market, went on to try to push RISC machines in the PC era and are still around in some form today). Also "Which Computer?" was a popular magazine at the time...
This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage.
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium. Otherwise it's simply dead data that's more than likely never going to have a need to be accessed again.... not every bit needs to be held forever.
Would the world have stopped turning if this little chunk of history gone unrecovered? No. Are there other forms of media (books, videos, music) from the 1980's that would have answered the same questions about culture and society that the data in this archive answers? Definately.
NO CARRIER
'The software and hardware needed to access the Domesday discs is to be deposited at the Public Record Office once the project is completed.'
This is all fine and good, but it has already introduced the problem we'll face in approximately 2015:
We're going to have to create an emulator for the emulator.
And so on, ad infinitum. What we really need is some universally acceptable method to store digital data that isn't likely to decay or fall out of favor in the next ten years. That, I'm afraid, is a difficult proposition.
I just hope the emulator's emulator works.
It is very much easier to educate a person according to the curriculum you desire if contradictory information is not available, especially regarding the history of a place. The extreme example is that of the Pol Pot regime. But you also see it in a newspaper when they fire all of the old hands who know where the bodies are buried, and only the young bucks are around who can be easily stampeded. No institutional memory.
On another note - if you want to damn a politician to history, make sure to get those stone obelisk and stelli erected with heavy engraving. Make sure some are out in the desert so that they are properly preserved.
Archeologists will come by centuries later and will take what you say as truth. Or at least very seriously. Have a field day.
the digital data will have disappeared, and the testimony on your stone monuments will be one of the few surviving original source records from the era.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Give it up man. Getting FPs on slashdot is just one of those things that can not be acheived by AI yet, ya know like beating people at chess and what not.
-Posting anon. because while I am not a Karma whore, I am a karma slut.
you need to back up regularly, and to a format that is useable by something else. And don't start in proprietary formats. Couldn't access the data for 16 years! Imagine if you had to try and explain that to an IRS auditor.
This only shows how cool paper is. (It's probably much cooler in its original state as trees but still pretty cool).
Someone might say that languages die as well but as you know from the Rosetta stone, it is possible to decipher even the most archaic writing with some luck and perserverence. Digitally written media, because of the huge amount of data that can be crammed and the 1 and 0 as the only two letters are much more difficult to read.
Wonder if there ever be software that would be able to look at piece of 1s and 0s and interpret them into what they mean...
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
Why didn't they just go to the Flea Market or the local Community College trash bin? That's where I find all my obsolete equipment...
Sig Sig Sputnik
Let's hear it for preserving our digital heritage! I'm so relieved to know that my descendants will be able to read my blogs centuries from now.
What is truly important to people in 100 years' time is often what seems unimportant to people today. That is why a 16th-century 4-page pamphlet is more valuable than a 400-page leatherbound book of the same date.
"Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."
Yah, but I wonder how well paper held up when they first started making it?...
The Domesday Project is now officially abandonware...
Rumor has it that MAME 0.7 will support it.
the original domesday book wasn't "printed" because printing hadn't been invented; it was handwritten.
As it only translates software calls and doesn't emulate hardware.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
WINE Is Not Emulation.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
My old school was using 1980's Arcons (and one PC with Windows 3.11 and an old Mac or some sort, these two were the 'good computers') The school didn't upgarde the computers untill 2000 (the year after I left)
All that I ever really saw them used for was playing Lemmings. Although I thought Textease was a good program.
No.. no you didn't RTFA. Because if you had you would have seen this:
And, also this:
So, what it is is an inventory of England. People and culture. Please don't say you RTFAd if you didn't, and then don't ask for more information when you say you don't care.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Thanks to emulators and backwords compatibillity. Its still possilbe to run programs orginally made 40 years ago. Think about it. If Microsoft Palladises the future, over 25 years worth of x86 software will be rendered useless! Only open source will be able to keep digital history preserved. In 2986 we will look back at this digital doomesday (if computers as we know it still exist) and say, thanks to the open source heros, we can still see what life was like back then.
You're just jealous 'cause we have mediaeval history.
.. they should be quite safe from the long arms of the DMCA! Just ask Dmitry
----- Indecision is the key to flexibility.
What could it be, what could it be?
Could it be, I dunno, maybe HTML ?
Use open standards, and port your data as better-supported, better-performing storage formats, electronic (gif->jpg) and physical (LD->CDROM) appear.
Is it really that hard?
Yes, a paper copy would be nice, too, assuming it was all static data. But seriously.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
"Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."
Not really. I saw one volume of the Domesday book at the White Tower back in 2000. It was sealed under a sealed glass box, and you could only look at the two pages it was turned to. I would have tried to get access to it under the box, but there were these guards that looked quite intimidating and they kept saying "Move along..."
Even then, I could barely make out the cryptic scribbles. Sure didn't look like English to me.
At least with a digital version they can make infinite copies of it and distribute it to anybody interested, unlike the paper version locked up under a glass box.
This is why I still shoot film. Resolution will cease to be an issue in a few years, but I still want to be able to make prints of my work in twenty years.
>> By contrast, the original Domesday Book, an inventory of England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks, is in fine condition in the Public Record Office in Kew, London
An inventory of what? Lutes? Bear-baiting posts? DIY witchburning kits?
>> The video discs feature about a million people in the UK
Which people, and doing what, and for what purpose?
Ok, its an archive. But an archive of what, and for whom?
Whatever, mod me down as flamebait again.
Just more time spent trying to decipher slashdots crappy report of the BBC's shitty, uninformative coverage.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
In Soviet Russia, we have no boners.
I want to see your asshole
Call your robot "the second post robot" and you'll be ok.
Acorn Computer
Damn, and I thought the Professor was all that by making a radio out of a coconut. A computer in an acorn? DAMN!
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
rambles a little, but has a good point
Just more time spent trying to decipher slashdots crappy report of the BBC's shitty, uninformative coverage.
Not so shitty to us Brits who remember the BBC micro and the Domesday Disc. And who pay for the BBC.
An inventory of what? Lutes? Bear-baiting posts? DIY witchburning kits?
England maps, English people, English buildings.
Which people, and doing what, and for what purpose?
English people, doing English things, to inventory English life.
Ok, its an archive. But an archive of what, and for whom?
English people, doing English things, for English people who want to document English life.
Whatever, mod me down as flamebait again.
I'm $rtbl'd, and there is no -1, Stupid mod so I wouldn't bother.
Just more time spent trying to decipher slashdots crappy report of the BBC's shitty, uninformative coverage.
Have you thought maybe just reading what they write? Maybe... just an idea.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Well, the 1086 Domesday book is really not easily accessible. It's physically present, yes, but unless you're fluent in Middle-English, it's pure gibberish. Hmm, kind of like the BBC digitial archive. Once we got around to translating it, it is perfectly accessible.
Much ado about nothing.
When seeing the comment about how computers are becoming tombs for information, I was immediately reminded of the "atomic priesthood" (discussed here and elsewhere) that has sometimes been offered as one way to keep track of another kind of decaying technology, old nuclear fuel dumps and reactor sites. Those can remain deadly for eons, certainly beyond the survival even of the English language (or any other current language). How do you warn people 10,000 years from now that a small hill in an unnamed valley is actually highly radioactive? What is the equivalent of "don't dig here" in the language of 10,000 years hence? One answer seems to be that only commands from G*d are translated with any tenacity (let alone accuracy) such that future generations will know not to dig on ground hallowed by some presumed religious event in the dim past (um...that would be next year for us). If you can overcome the rank cynicism, the implications in all this for the future are troubling to say the least.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
I don't know about you, but not many English speakers can still read/decode old middle English. I haven't tried reading the Domesday book myself, but if it's anything like Chaucer, the spelling is dynamic (i.e. not even consistent within the same document) and obscure by even modern English standards. Let alone the language itself is far different from modern English.
Therefore, saying that the original domesday book is still accessible is like saying the that all my old C64 files are still accessible because I still have the 5.25in floppies. (Note: the C64 floppies had varying number of sectors/track depending how close the track was to the hub ... these floppies can't be read on a DOS machine.)
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
I also remember see the finished version in the Natural History museum (or was it the Science museum?). It had one of those Marble Madness balls on the front for navigating - great fun.
If they put this online it will make a good read.
The original is here.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Digital is doomed, da comrade !!
And not only that...
...But if you really need to save images you could use revolutionary, ground-breaking algorithms like base64 or uuencode to save your PNG format images into the text stream as well!
It seems to me that formats like PNG, and the algorithms used to encode binary data as ascii could be easily 'rediscovered' and reimplemented even thousdands of years from now.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
...if the language is forgotten when the rock itself is found.
:-)
Obviously, it is overly simplistic to assume that you, as long as the physical medium is durable enough, your data will be preserved forever. Look at the difficulties we have interpreting the Rosetta stone, the hieroglyphs, etc today! The data IS there, but what use is it if nobody really understands it? Yes, lots of progress has been made in understanding them - but still, look at the difficulties.
The laserdisc was "decoded" with emulation. Any proposals on how to emulate ancient Egypt?
Some people are talking here about how you keep the data for long periods of time accessible etc...its not hard...
Digital data lasts for ever if you maintain it right, with no decay. If you record to CD today, put in a case and keep it on a shelf in a stable temperature and humidity, then at the very least it will last around 30 years. So long as you copy it off to another medium it makes no odds. And OK so CD-ROM will eventually be obsolete, so you copy it to DVD, and from DVD to whatever next. The data is completely irrespective of the media you choose to store it on. Digital data offers FAR more futureproofing than analogue ever could.
As for the fact that there are no readers left, i find this surprising considering how much cool antique hardware geeks like to give a good home to, there must have been hundreds or thousands of these machines at schools around the country in the UK.
It was written in Latin, I suspect.Old English wouldn't have been much use to the French-speaking Conqueror and his henchment.
>Note: the C64 floppies had varying number of sectors/track depending how close the track was to the hub ... these floppies can't be read on a DOS machine
Wanna Bet? DOS is actually one of the few OSes that can handle the real-time work well enough...
(Yes, it works. Very well. Just don't burn out your 1541 in turbo mode!)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The real problem is that people don't look any further than right here, right now. All that's required to preserve digital data for future generations to revere or vilify is an effort to keep migrating it onto future media and to publish the method of reading the data along with it. Software formats come and go, there are probably software packages that can't even reliably read data using older versions of that software package.
The specification for the format in which the data is stored is the Rosetta Stone of the 21st century. Make this open and data can live in perpetuity.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I can see it all now. LUGs getting together to make testimonial stone glyphs testifying to the Ages their opinions of the character of their least favorite politician or software company.
You get the idea. Also applies to politicians.
have a blast. Have it placed on you tombstone or something. or in the side of a cliff.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I played with this kit for ages when my mother brought one home from the school she worked at. I was just a small kid at the time but was a budding programmer, so was fascinated when I saw the BBC micro (6502 based with 64 or 128Kb of RAM) do things that I hadn't imagined for it. This was because of the video disc player (which was enormous) must have overlayed its output onto the video signal of the computer.
There were a few relevant video clips, e.g. of the Falklands war, but the most interesting content for me was where they had walked round Brecon (in Wales) and taken photos at various intervals and in about eight directions (and then with zooms of interesting features), so the effect was that the user could explore the place. Interaction was via a mouse as I remember and the display quality was far in advance of what the BBC micro was capable of.
All the sections of the content were navigated around in some sort of virtual art gallery (a bit like someone might make with VRML).
Another useful feature was the extensive maps of the whole of the UK that were easily manipulated/zoomed.
Most of the posts here are assuming that the content was protected in some DRM style way, but I don't think that is true. It seems likely to me that the navigation system for the data was encapsulated in the program, and so emulation or rewriting are the only options.
Brian.
What is a more "future Proof" medium. Yes you could argue that Magnetic tape is a bad choice but, then again so are CDRoms, Paper and Stone tablets. All of them tend to break down over time. And, even if you print the whole thing to paper (or film for the videos) you face the fact that over the truly long term such recordings get lost or like old languages (such as Ancient Greek and Algol) we occasionally lose the ability to translate them.
IMHO the first part of your post was more on target, if we want to keep these things around we need to maintain them. We need to be porting them every so often from one format to the next.
Unfortunately the set of all data that we want to save is monotonically increasing. Therefore the cost of storing and maintaining all of the "important stuff" in purpetuity will be increasing as well. So then we have to start deciding what will or will not be kept (in other words what someone wants to pay for) and what gets dropped. What's more important, the original Domesday book or the digital version?
So, what it is is an inventory of England. People and culture. Please don't say you RTFAd if you didn't, and then don't ask for more information when you say you don't care.
Jeez. Are you always a jerk?
(Hint: shielding fragile man-made objects from the elements--for 10 centuries--might be considered "difficult" by some.)
Ain't it ironic that people find their old websites and usenet postings they had hoped were gone forever now preserved forever on google and the way back machine, yet any digital information they want to keep will vanish?
So they are now running BBChost in Virtual Acorn in Windows to show the Americans what Gates tried to destroy in the 90's ?/
Two universities involved ? There's a site with Acorn emulators for everyone's taste:
http://acorn.cybervillage.co.uk/emulation
I suppose you'd like to simply ignore the fact that Iraq did, in fact, expel weapon inspectors on 30-Oct-1997 and 2-Nov-1997. UNSCOM inspectors of US nationality were expelled and/or refused entry on those dates. (Sources: 1, 2
Yes, Butler ordered the teams to leave after this point, but Iraq did indeed block the inspectors.
I think the only way to preserve data over the very long term (thousands of years) is to assume that whoever reads it in the future will be an alien (eg so different from us as to make any assumptions impossibile). Assume nothing about what we may have in common, and start from the basics. Any digital data that wants to be permanent in the same way that cuneaform tablets are permanent must contain not only data, but must begin with a complete description of what it takes to decode the data, starting from establishing a basic mathematical language. Very, very difficult. Perhaps we should be consulting linguists and archeologists when we're looking to put together these kinds of archives? Ask an archeologist, "What would make your job easier if you found it in the beginning of an ancient inscribed stone tablet? What kinds of things would aid you in translating it?" and go from there.
To be kept available future data archives will need to be copied over and over. They will have to be copied in bulk, there will not be the man power to do specials on anything.
What am I trying to say: this problem will get worse, worse than you can imagine. Well defined, simple Open standards for data is a must for the basics. Well defined, simple Open standards for Open Source applications to implement anything richer - these applications growing gradually over time, but maintaining backwards compatability. I still use troff and can still maintain/print documents that are over 15 years old.
A proprietary future will be much poorer than an Open one. A future that overly controls copying will be much poorer than an open one.
All of the numbers above are probably an underestimate.
There was an original Doomsday machine going on e-bay not long ago.
IIRC it was a BBC Master 128 with 2nd processor, SCSI card, video disc player and track ball.
Still worked, although some of the disks were damaged.
What format and storage medium you adopt for truly long term data storage is still a thorny issue. The only medium we know can survive this long, and which has a reasonable data density, is good old fashioned acid-free paper and ink. This was the approach that the Hipparcos Project, a satellite mission to measure the positions and motions of stars to unprecedented accuracy, chose for their long term archive. As well as electronic storage, they published a paper catalog in books using acid free paper, long duration inks, and a font specially designed to make OCR easy, and then made sure that lots of different libraries, scattered over the world, had copies.
We still can't beat paper for durability.
I'd like to know how one steals games with Stella and Mame as well. I compiled a new release candidate of xmame last night, but I've not been able to facilitate the theft of anything with it.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Check out the low-tech Acorn deals to be had everyday.
I wonder if they deliver via UPS - I'd hate to wait 16 years to receive my item. : )
Yes, the domesday book is still readable 1000 years later. This is probably the norm for systems taht have a low rate of change and evolution. However, a feature in evolving systems is that some branchs die out, and the understanding/knowledge/system disappears. If we take a few examples, we can see that it is not so uncommon in to have dead languages too. Egyptian heiroglyphics were undecipherable to western civilisation (and modern egypt afaik) up to and including the early part of the century, after the Egyptian empire dissolved and the written language was lost. Another example of lost languages are Linear A and Linear B; the former was discovered to be a form of greek with different symbols (and some slightly modified rules) for writing; the latter has yet to be decided.
This is what I don't get. Ancient books require much work and care to preserve them in a readable state - obviously, average use will, in time, degrade the pages due to air, moisture, oil from fingers turning the pages, among other threats.
Yet, seemingly, it seems that this project seems content to leave this archive sitting around without attempts to preserve the contents. Yes, I'm sure, they probably preserve the physical media - but this would be akin to preserving the domesday book's cover, while not caring what is inside. This project let the data sit in a format while the rest of the technology world passed them by.
And somehow, this is supposed to prove that digital data is more tenuous than the printed media. While this may be true, the way they gather this conclusion is specious.
Digital content requires occasional processing of the data and converting it into a format that can continue to be read on current machines. Case in point: Deja News/Google Groups. We still have, and are able to read, archives from usenet dating back to the earliest days of usenet - all originally stored in formats that very likely could not be read today would it not have been for digital archivists carefully converting the data into a newer format. And I'm sure, when the day comes that the format they are in now is unable to be used with the technology of the day, there will be digital archivists there again to convert the data into yet another format, preserving the contents for future generations.
or is it doomsday?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Tell it like it is, Respected Hero!
Although I'm wary of biology:computer analogies, in the context of "information wants to be alive", storage and data format obsolesence is a good example of natural selection.
Consider: there are finite amounts of human attention, human/machine effort, time, money, bandwidth, and storage. These are all resources for which information competes. Useful information will receive enough of these resources to ensure its survival; it will be copied from old, degrading media and old, obsolete formats onto new ones. Less useful information may not; it may sit on a tape until oxidation renders it unreadable; it may reside in a forgotten file format; it may linger on an optical disk for which no working drives exist.
The original Domesday book hasn't survived because paper is such a great storage medium. It's survived because it's interesting. How many other pieces of paper circa 1086 haven't been sufficiently interesting to survive to this day? Almost all of them. Would Shakespeare's work really be extinct if he'd written it on a PC? No. Are the hardcopies of my 1982 high school essays extinct? Hell yes. It's not the medium, it's the message.
Which begs the question: does anybody really care about the BBC Domesday project, or is it only of interest to us because it's a good example of information doomed to extinction not by technology, but by its own worthlessness?
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
Given the numerous existing BBC Micro emulators, I'm curious as to whether they actually developed their own from scratch, or if this project utilises one of the existing emulators. The laserdisc work would have been new, of course.
The BBC Micro was a very nicely-designed piece of hardware, and (IMHO) the very best 8-bit computer of its day. The BBC Lives has a wealth of good information for the curious or nostalgic.
As a point of interest, Acorn also designed the (now incredibly successful) ARM processor when they made the jump from 8-bit to 32-bit computing with their Archimedes (later RiscPC) line of computers. ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine before they spun off into a separate company, and re-named themselves Advanced RISC Machines. (The ARM CPUs have come a long way since then of course, but it was a remarkable design from the start.)
EBay has them. I suspect that any mass produced computer or peripheral from the 1970s onward will usually be around for 30-40 years in attics and can be found if people need it desparately enough.
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies
I have to ask you, what's important? State records of live births on microfilm? Church recods of marriage? Death certificates? Survey maps of property? How about regular family photos?
A government of a modern state with lots of money tried to do what all of us would like to do and failed due to closed and propriatory data standards and the inability to make those copies. Obviously, no one passed the multimilion dollar projects onto new media. What makes you think you will do any better? Do you think your local state office is doing better with their rotting celophane and acid paper? No, I'm afraid that a real promblem has been shown here. The only reason the BBC failed first is because they tried first. They did better than NPR's audio tape disaster because the disks are still here, but failed because no one makes the readers. It's a problem that will get worse as Paladium etc, moves in to make sure that only a few can do so much as read "important" information, much less copy it. Do you have your CDs so well managed that you can actually transfer the information before CD readers are no more?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The first thing we did at school when we had a chance to go on the "computer" was to try and find our houses on it.
Oh, and of course you'd explore peoples houses, to see if you could see women in the showers.
Shit never changes....
Get your own free personal location tracker
If you speak Old English, that is. It's a rather different language from even the English of Chaucer (ca. 1350).
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
The moral of the story, speaking as a UK TV licence-payer is: don't trust the BBC. Not to keep our data safe, and not to do a decent job of tech reporting either.
> This is just one early indication of how
> difficult it will be to maintain our digital
> heritage.
No, it's an indication of how easy it will be.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
My question is: What happens if someone owns the "copyright" but doesn't own a copy from which to use that right?
BTW, I have something that may be on the verge of falling into this category.
you niglet
Of course, the DMCA is a US law anyway
True in name.
and neither Acorn nor the BBC fall under its domain.
True pedantically, but false in practice. The United Kingdom has had its own equivalent to the DMCA's circumvention ban since 1988, as section 296 of the Copyright Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
nobody's going to remember how to decode WMA, MPG, or whatever whiz-bang video format it was last encoded in. But if you stick to a very simple text-based layout
I worry more about English becoming a dead language.
Will I retire or break 10K?
On a similar theme
And what medium do you suppose we should use?
"Since a DVD player could never survive impact, diagrams explaining how to build one from scratch will be engraved on the surface of several dozen of the disks".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not really. Even if I could understand the language, I still can't search it with regular expressions, automatically create indexes, incorporate it in a knowledge base, read it out loud through a speech synthesizer, or anything else useful.
Printed material is nice for reading, but reading alone doesn't imply accessibility.
The Long Now Foundation (http://www.longnow.org) is an org that concerned with the cultural memory of humans. Among other problems they face is the retention of data. One of their solutions for making sure something passes down throug hthe next 10,000 years (their timeframe) is to make many many copies in a near-indestructible format and distribute them across the world.
I sure hope that there are more than one set of the BBC discs!
-- "They say that time changes things. The truth is, you have to change them yourself." (Andy Warhol, adapted)
This usually requires the depiction of alot of damned souls be dragged off to eternal damnation. These need to be shown as they are transforming into beasts, they are getting ripped apart by demons, the usual.
On course, more than one of his critics are depicted there, in various forms of demonic torment. And they are remembered to this day only because they are in the painting
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Alecto Historical Editions has translated the books from Latin to English and is selling them in printed and electronic form (BTW the translation, not the Latin, is what is copyrighted).
There are two Domesday Books books: Little Domesday (comprising Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk) and Great Domesday (the other English counties).
They have also photographed each folio of the book and scanned them from transparencies at good res (888 folios altogether).
There's also a transcription of the book. (A bloke called Farley typeset the Latin some time in the
18th century. Unfortunately I keep visualising Chris Farley.) This too has now been photographed and scanned.
It's pretty dry stuff, but historically important: basically, it's an 11th century inventory, conducted at the time of Kings Edward and William (the Conqueror). It says who owned what, who lived where, how much money was paid in tax, etc. as well as containing all sorts of social comment. For us plebs the amazing thing is that you can look up a town, read what was there, and still see what remains in real life.
[Disclaimer: I know this stuff not because I'm a history buff but because for a while know we've been working on putting it all on CD-ROM for them. By coincidence the gold masters went out today. If I have to pnmrotate one more sodding 250MB image I'll kill someone.]
The archive itself fitted on two laser discs, but there were many copies of these discs - my local library (and presumably most other UK libraries) had a copy. I remember spending time in the late eighties looking through the information that was available. I remember being impressed by the technology [or at least how big and shiny the disks were], but as far as I recall the data was mostly remarkable for being unremarkable. In common with most records of contemporary society its only likely to become interesting when it ceases to be the mundane of the present. I imagine I would find it much more interesting now.
I wonder what happened to all the disks and readers, were they scrapped or are they to be found in the deepest darkest corner of the library stores?
It would be good if they could put this all on line - especially for the embarassment of all those who were children at the time and contributed to the project through their schools.
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.
As the GNU project says, "source code" is the preferred form for modification of a work. For this project, the source code for the display program might be BASIC or assembler, but that's not important. What's important is the text/image/video/audio content, and the source form for that content might be XML PNM (no lossy compression), uncompressed AVI and WAV files.
Converting the original, BBC-Micro specific program into a modern source format will eliminate the need for a special or unique system to access that content.
Furthermore, distribution costs on the Internet approach zero, so that work can be made widely available to everybody, not just a few schools or visitors to a museum.
Over time our popular formats such as JPEG and AVI files will become obsolete, so the work must be converted into that newer form in future, possibly ad-infinitum. At least those future conversions will occur from one well-known and popular format into another.
They haven't really learned from their efforts, have they?
So here's the new reason to use open source: It is important to preserve our digital heritage, and using source code is the best means we have of making works accessable and compatible with the computers of the future.
I work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Back in the day(TM) before RDBMS were a commodity, SLAC used the SPIRES database written at Stanford running on an IBM Mainframe. Well, as these things go, the IBM Mainframe was getting long in the tooth, but there was a ton of data in this SPIRES database. SPIRES wasn't going to get ported to anything modern. I forget who exactly, but one engineer just up and decided to write an emulator for the IBM mainframe in practicly no time at all.
Now the SPIRES database is still running. However, it now runs on Solaris using a home-brewed IBM Mainframe emulator. Even though it's in emulation, it runs faster than it ever used to on the real deal (Moore's Law and all).
As a side note, the first truly useful web site was here at SLAC when George Crane and Paul Kunz hooked up a web front end to the SPIRES database so the High Energy Physics community could easily get at other's papers.
The whole place is full of Brits! Grab yer muskets (or your gun if you don't have a firearm). Remember, it's one if by LAN and two if by HTTP . . . I think that's how it worked. :)
I worked at the Interactive Television Unit (the BBC department that was founded for the Domesday Project) for the last 3 months of its existence in 1989 before it was spun out into the MultiMedia Corporation in Jan 1990 (I then worked at MMC until 1997, when it bacame a shell company owned bythe stockbrokers, but that's another story).
When we left the BBC, they had all the original Video data on Broadcast quality masters, and all the digital data preserved on VAX tapes. They must have thrown those out in the intervening 12 years (which wouldn't surprise me).
I know of two former MMC directors who have CD-ROM backups of the digital data and working Domesday systems.
Which is not to decry the work in emulating it - that si the real long-term answer. The Church-Turing thesis is the ultimate refutation of DRM too.
If they where to use an archive that was constantly being added to then they would have all the equipment they needed (and ideally schematics...including those for the components, right down to basic manufacture from ore if necessary, we are talking about the ultimate storage system after all) to store and retive the data and they could easily convert it to the next format when the archive changed over. What about storing the text/images encoding free in a crystal a page at a time...they want to do it encoded and the technology is on the way for that...a minor modification and it becomes more future friendly.
If you're really interested is a link to the web site...
http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/index.html
Here's my big idea, please feel free to shoot the hell out of it. :)
Let's assume you have a piece of physical media with your information on it. Say one side holds the data in an optical format, and the other side can be used to put text on in the form of ink or engraving, which is human-readable. A CD-ROM would be an example of this. Now, in English*, describe on the human-readable side how the bits on the data side are laid out, in sufficient detail so that, if necessary, a device could be built from scratch to read the media. Also convey the format of the first x number of bits, say, in an 8-bit ascii format to keep things simple. Don't forget to describe the format so people can decypher what the initial bits mean!
Ok, so now say we can read bits off of the other side of the media. Since we know the format of the initial bits, and the characters that they correspond to are in English*, we can use that initial data to describe the filesystem layout of the rest of the disc. Now, if the whole disc is going to be in the same format (ascii), no additional metadata description would be needed.
A good thing to put in this plain text area would be, say, something indicating that starting at bit x we have some images that are x bits long, a description of the image format, and any other information that would be necessary to describe the proper way to display the image.
*Now, of course, English may not be the proper choice. Maybe some other language would be appropriate, I'm not a linguist. Maybe every disc should be forced to have a standard 'rosetta stone' placed on it somehow?
The basic idea is that there should be enough human (or alien) readable information on the disc itself such that a device could be constructed to read the rest, increasing in complexity as we switch from ink text->ascii->filesystem->files.
Does this sound reasonable?
man tunefs | grep fish
Remember everyone that trusted computing specifically aims to not allow emulation anymore... that's what it's designed to kill. As this article indirectly points out, the death of emulation could very well mean the death of archivists and archiving.
What we need to be concerned about is the marketing hype that will surround "trusted computing."
For an analogy, I recall a line from a web site I read years ago about XML:
"Q: What can XML do? A: Anything your boss tells you to do with it."
We're going to see infomercials and targeted advertising at corporate executives (Microsoft's most lucrative market gateway) about how "trusted computing" can ensure the safety of your data. (Complete with rear-view video of a someone typing away at a keyboard, in a dark room with the outline of the person only visible by reflection from the CRT.)
At the point when data in "trusted" portions of computers can only be transferred to other computers with such "trusted" data storage capabilities, the necessity of having such a PC at home will become vital for anyone who wants to work at home with any data some hair-brained exec decides is important enough to encrypt.
So people start buying computers with these trusted regions, with the only operating system that can access these regions already installed.
And for those few who still say DRM won't be enforced by Palladium and the like: All the record company has to do is release the digital version of an audio file in the "protection" region of memory, and you're now subject to the whims of the licensing arrangements devised for that file.
Perhapse the worst part: Even inadvertently recording such data that was played through someone's speakers will be a violation of the DMCA.
What's this Submit thingy do?
In fact Linear B is distorted Greek and Linear A is undeciphered, but bonus points for a good try.
Um... My guess is that your average computer power supply transformer is most likely not to contain PCB's.
This isn't any ordinary darkness. It's advanced darkness.
English will be the world's standard language for thousands of years.
I can't readily understand the English language spoken even 600 years ago, before the great vowel shift.
Read about the history of the English language
Will I retire or break 10K?
It seems that the original site, http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/index.html, is either being slashdotted, or is no longer up.
A mirror can be found here.
Funny, I thought the nice part about the DIGITAL ver was that I WOULD be able to access it - unlike the original Doomsday book, which, despite your claim, would take considerable effort (travel, etc) to make 'accessable' to ME.
Was I the only person who initially read that as Doomsday book? I even managed to make it all of the way through the BBC article and well into the comments before realizing it.
"Inflammable means flammable? What a strange country!" -Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
Is the emulator publicly available, does anyone know?
I remember fondly guiding that wobbly shiney Videodisc into the outboard drive at school - it was as wide as my shoulders!
I'm suprised the data can't be converted. I suppose that would cost too much.
So, where can I download the lot then? (partly joking). I wanna know what my great,great grandad did for a living.
Hopefully the data really is public.
A blog I run for the wealth
Emulation is not, ever, a violation of intellectual property rights.
The fact that some people use emulation as a tool to violate such rights does not mean that emulation itself is illegal.
The original Domesday book was a review of people and property. It was so that the ruling classes could work out how much they were worth and who could pay what taxes. It turned out an accurate review of the state of the nation at the time and invaluable to historians.
The modern one was an accademic exercise and to give similar information. It was primarily used in schools as a teaching aid.
A friend and I have all the equipment to read these discs we just didn't have the discs themselves. A couple of years ago we were discussing them and decided that the way to go was to produce DVDs containing the data which could be used both on PCs and consumer gear.
So why not DVDs?
And I have other questions.
* Why did it take far longer to develop the emulator than it did the original hardware.
* What's wrong with existing emulators?
* Why not make the data more available/open.
It seems that no one thought about this project before starting it.
Renaissance: the great revival of art and letters, under the influence of classical models, which began in Italy in the 14th century
Reformation: the great religious movement of the 16th century, having for its object the reform of the doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome.
Most of the problem apparently was getting the bits of the medium - since the 80's this has been superceeded by the Internet.
Who uses floppies anymore if you can send it by email?
Put the thing on the net, and let people mirror it!
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
My school hte British International School in Jakarta Indonesia had a whole heap of acorns which we still used when I left in 1998. Maybe they could get some from there. easy.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
I too played with one of these first hand - my folks were both senior teachers at the time and one of them brought the whole rig home for the summer, We were lucky enough to have two BBC B Micros in the house at the time (for the uninitiated there were four BBC branded Micros, the 'A', the 'B' (by far the most common and also the unit pictured in the BBC News article) 'Master', and 'Master-Compact') so I was already pretty familiar with 'em
Doomesday was run from a BBC Master with a gigantic Video-Disc player. The content was all accessed through a custom interface since the file system the Beebs used was text-only and would have been nightmarish to navigate... as far as I know all the maps, video data etc. could have been coded into two files, one on each disc, so I can understand that you'd need a Beeb to be able to get at the content, what I don't understand is what the fuss is about here? I've had BBC emulators pretty much ever since I stopped using 'real live' BBCs - Acorns RISC based machines (the Archimedes series) all came with BBC Micro emulation as standard, later I ran emulators on my Amiga, and and I currently have a shareware BBC emulator kicking about on the hard drive of my PowerBook, unless I'm mistaken the only real innovation here is perhaps in tweaking the software or drivers into life on the emulator - the em.s themselves are very VERY old news
nice that it's being done though
Books were hand written/copied back then, I believe? It wasn't until Gutenberg (The guy, not the project
Nobody really did entire woodprints of books, did they? Or maybe those guys were the really l337 h4XX0rZ of their time.
Cool - I have an piece on the new Domesday Book that I wrote when I was about 9. Only a couple of paragraphs about East Mersea Oyster Fisheries, but all the same, I'm going to have my words immortalized! Or not, to take the point of the article, I guess...
Regards,
Tim.
I don't know if there's a single language for which we have (still-legible) text that we, collectively, don't understand.
Until moderns found the Rosetta Stone, we couldn't read hieroglyphic Egyptian. Linear B was deciphered into a form of early Greek in the 1950s, and it appears that Etruscan has been recently deciphered, but Linear A, Voynich, etc. remain unknown.
Read more about the Voynich Manuscript
Will I retire or break 10K?
But the reason I am responding right now is that I have a pretty high opinion of the /. crowd as a whole. So yes, I thought that other /. posters with interests in such things might know the answer off the top of their heads, or Google it differently, or whatever.
I think the succes of emulators like Snes9X overshadowed the software meaning.
Maconlinux.org could use a refresher too.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
I think if I had one testament to carve for a future generation that wishes to reconstruct my digital data and try and emulate the system, it would be "hey, :x to save and quit"
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France