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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."
See here
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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!
If you're too lazy or ignorant to use Google:
. ht ml
a y. html
"The first approach to a modern assessment roll or cataster is the well known Domesday Book."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/domesday1
"The Domesday Book was ordered by William the Conqeror to assess the value of his conquered kingdom 20 years after defeating Harold at the Battle of Hastings."
http://www.villagenet.co.uk/history/1086-domesd
It is spelt "Domesday" It is pronounced "Dooms-Day"
Blame the French.
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is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium.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.
The Domesday book was commissioned in December 1085 by William the Conqueror, who invaded England in 1066. The first draft was completed in August 1086 and contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time).
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda, it was mainly set up to inform the king of how much tax monies he should have been receiving.
Find out more.
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"
The Domesday Project is now officially abandonware...
Rumor has it that MAME 0.7 will support it.
Good question. Original slash article says it was a Master system, but the BBC article has a picture of a model B.
My model B is still in fine working condition, thank you very much, but I don't have a laserdisc player for it. Now, I certinaly wouldn't mind getting my hands on the emulator either...mmmm, Elite....
The BBC wanted a micro which they could use in their educational stuff. They went to Acorn, who was a successful manufacturer of the Atom, and basically they agreed that the next generation computer, which was to be called the Proton could be called the BBC Micro. This gave Acorn exposure and extra sales, and the BBC the machine they were looking for. For about a decade, you saw BBC micro's popping up in BBC shows including Dr Who. Acorn later made the Electron, and then the Archimedies, before going bankrupt.
Therefore the BBC do not own the copyright on the ROM's in the BBC micro.
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?!
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.
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!!!!
BBC Micro == Acorn == Acorn BBC Micro.
Or more accurately:
The British Broadcasting Company (the BBC) wanted to build a microcomputer in the early 1980s which they could use as part of their effort to promote national computer literacy. The idea was to have a standard machine that they could use in their TV shows - and viewers could buy one of their own and learn to use and program it by watching the shows.
After approaching several UK computer manufacturers they settled on Acorn. At the time Acorn were a leading supplier of micros, notable the Acorn Atom. The BBC contracted Acorn to produce a new more advanced version of the Atom which was designed and manufactured by Acorn but sold as the BBC Micro.
The BBC Micro was never sold as an Acorn machine, indeed Acorn produced their own rival (and much less successful) machine called the Electron.
So your equation is not strictly true, but its close.
Sailing over the event horizon
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda
/. thread for the info, but just click on the link in the main story and read it for yourself. Essentially "Domesday" translates to "Day of Judgements" in modern English.
Excepting that they're the same word, just the language has evolved in the intervening millenium.
I could rape the previous
"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.
I'm curious as to whether this is technically legal under the DMCA
Well, gee, since the original project was done by the BBC, on a BBC microcomputer, and the emulation of said microcomputer was commissioned by the BBC, I don't think the DMCA applies.
The overall question you ask is a valid one, but the answer is "repeal idiotic laws like the DMCA". Not throw it all away and start over, in which case you'll just face the same problem a few years later.
Good point - in that case, shouldn't Apple be able to sue themselves over the "Classic" emulation in OSX?
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
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
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.
The Beeb may have had the BBC owl logo on it, but they were sold by (and the profits went to) Acorn. The Electron was basically a lost cost version of the Beeb, another part of the product line - it wasn't a rival. I was Acorn employeee ~12.
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 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.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), the computer was developed for BBC. Even if Acorn did the work on it, it was work for hire - which, in the US at least, puts the copyright in the employer's name.
Of course, the DMCA is a US law anyway, and neither Acorn nor the BBC fall under its domain. Nor is the work in question under US purview. I suppose you could go after the University of Michigan researchers, who are in the US, but that's it.
Yes, I realize the whole Dmitry Skylarov issue, but that is a case of a foreign national violating the DMCA on a work owned by an US entity (a corporation). IANAL, but I think it's a considerable difference.
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?
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.
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.
Copyright? On a book written nearly a thousand years ago?!
Stupid Sonny Bono...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Crown copyright may be infinite. I have seen discussion which indicates that the King James version of the Bible (commissioned by the crown, as was the Domesday Book) has an infinite copyright.
I wonder whether that would change if Britain became a republic?
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