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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."
Good job they're not a US company, otherwise they'd be forced to sue themselves under the DMCA.
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>
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!
'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.
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.
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
All the more reason to be very careful what storage format you archive your pr0n collection on.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
"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.
Oh, that's right, it didn't, and before WINE the term 'emulation' was more generic and didn't create ridiculous non-dictionary distinctions.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
My initial reaction was very similar to yours. "Well, gee." Upon further thought, I realized that I am familiar with quite a few cases where a set/bunch of info was initially thought to be useless, allowed to go "fallow" (become forgotten, etc.), and later re-discovered and found to be of "ground-breaking" importance. One of the best examples might be the "losing" of just about everything really useful that was written by the ancient Greeks. The "saviors" of this "technology" were the Arabs. The rediscovery of the Greek philosophers (et al). helped usher in the European Reformation. :})||
There are plenty of good BBC Micro emulators - and plenty of functioning computers still out there (I wouldn't be surprised if some were still in use in schools). I think the difficulty comes in finding a laserdisc player.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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
>> So, exactly what software or hardware did WINE modify to complete the WINE project?
You mean linux natively supports DLL (Dynamic Linking Library) and PE (Portable Executable) binary formats?
WINE emulates the Windows environment. It doesn't emulate an x86 or any other hardware directly, which is why it won't work under PPC linux, and why they don't want to consider it an emulator.
It is, however, in the logical and literal senses, an emulator. It's just not a hardware emulator.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
Yeah, that's right. The current generation *always* knows what's valuable and what isn't.
For example, we don't miss any of the treasures of the Roman empire lost under Constantine, Justinian and his successors when the newly ascendant Christians went on a Taliban style orgy of destruction, smashing up anything they considered "pagan" or "unacceptable".
And scholars of Rome *certainly* don't miss any of the works held in the libraries of Rome that were destroyed by the Gothic invaders before the so-called dark ages.
Nor does anyone regret that poverty striken Icelanders took to using ancient manuscripts for dress patterns and firelighters in the 19th century. Nope, didn't lose much there at all.
Hell, we don't even miss all those Egyptian writings destoryed in the 19th century. Or by the Aswan Dam project.
And of course, accidents never happen. Just forget about that little fire in the Library of Alexandra.
I genuflect to your superior wisdom and knowledge.
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.