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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."
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"
From the site linked : "Also, as many visitors will have noticed, the extracts from Domesday entries that were previously on the site have regrettably been removed for copyright reasons."
Copyright? On a book written nearly a thousand years ago?!
Only problem is that devices can age and wear out just sitting on the shelf - electrolytic capacitors can dry out, transformers can leak PCB's, metals can corrode, etc.
A schematic does not contain all of the information needed to build a device, either. Seeing, for example, that a 2N2222 bipolar NPN transistor is required for an amplifier isn't going to be too useful in the year 2100, I would bet. And the paper those semiconductor companies use for those big thick spec books? that crap turns yellow and falls apart in 10 years!
Just to react to the dozens of dopey "wine isnt an emulator" answers you're about to recieve, I present the dictionary.com definition of emulator.
Emulator:
1.2. (omitted - irrelevant)
3. Computer Science. To imitate the function of (another system), as by modifications to hardware or software that allow the imitating system to accept the same data, execute the same programs, and achieve the same results as the imitated system.
Yes, Virginia, WINE IS an emulator!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Sure, it may be no great loss to us if the Spiderman movie isn't able to be viewed in the future, but the Spiderman movie isn't the only thing that will use DRM.
What would happen if something as culturally significant as the Bible or other work of a similar level were created and controlled by a DRM system.
What about music? Look at classical music - certainly some of the music created today would be listened to years in the future. But if it is controlled by a "lockdown" method like DRM how are we expected to listen to it?
I guess it boils down to two questions for me:
1. How do we(they?) determine what is culturally significant? Hindsight is 20/20, but we have no way of determining what media are going to be significant at the outset. In other words, we have no way of determining what is culturally significant when it is created.
2. How do we preserve information for the future? It's been stated before, but I'll repeat it - we're in a dangerous period(historically speaking), with most of our information being stored in manners that may not be retrievable in 30 years time, let alone 1,000 or more.
*gets off soapbox* err, sorry.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Read the article, this isn't just text but video and graphics. ASCII isn't going to cut it, and if was just text you'd think we could spring for unicode.
Regardless, the problem mentality is pretty well represented in your post. The assumption in the 80s was to make the discs like the book - make them last forever. The trick with digital is to assume the media and format will expire, become obselete, etc. To preserve the data they should have planned for this (migrating data, etc) instead of keeping the old book mentality of preserving a relic forever.
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.
...information is a co-evolutionary endeavour. We manufacture information as an artifact to impart a message be it plans to construct a further artifact or simply to impart the message. But the effort requires a sender and a receiver. It is co-evolutionary not proprietory. Going back to Marshall McLuhan, and the idea that the medium is the message, in DRM and proprietory schemes to control information, the proprietorship becomes the dominant message and the information, culture, what have you becomes merely the vehicle for commerce and attempted monopoly. Culture, history, knowledge do not spring from one mind they are siphoned by individuals from the well spring of all of recorded information and the tools to use that information.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen