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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!
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.
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.