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Digital Domesday Rescued By Emulation

Posted by timothy on from the good-thing-it-wasn't-palladium-protected dept.

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."

22 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. DRM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful



    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>

    1. Re:DRM by C+A+S+S+I+E+L · · Score: 5, Funny
      Actually, it's just as well the data was on videodisc rather than DVD. Otherwise, think of all the work that would have done on the emulator, only to arrive at the message

      Region Error

  2. What about next time? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:

    '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.

    1. Re:What about next time? by Jester99 · · Score: 5, Informative

      "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."

      Project Gutenberg's done it for a while.

      It's called "ASCII."

      Readily convertable to dead-tree format by every printer. Ever. Backward and forward portable on every 7- and 8-bit machine in existance. Ever. Readable on any screen by well over 1/3 the world's population. Can convey an immense amount of information.

      (They didn't have images in their records for the last 2000 years; frankly, if something's really So Important That It Must Be Saved, it can be done in the good queen's English.)

      If you just take a disk and don't do any crazy filesysteming, just write one big honking text file sequentially to it, and mark down somewhere on the top that it functions in 8-bit units, well, it doesn't take too much effort to figure out how to write a driver for it to port it to the next media that comes along.

      (Or just print it out. After all, high quality acid-free paper, stored in a vault somewhere, has a shelf-life measureable in centuries. Not too shabby.)

    2. Re:What about next time? by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  3. Re:Domesday? by pknoll · · Score: 5, Informative
    From The Domesday Book Online:

    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.

  4. The Curse of History by Alien54 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The politcal implications of this are interesting.

    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"
  5. Re:Domesday? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?!

  6. Re:What's so hard by iggymanz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  7. Re:Which computer? by gwernol · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  8. Re:Domesday? by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Informative

    The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda

    Excepting that they're the same word, just the language has evolved in the intervening millenium.

    I could rape the previous /. 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.

  9. Original Domesday is not quite accessible by sheldon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:Original Domesday is not quite accessible by Selanit · · Score: 5, Informative
      Even then, I could barely make out the cryptic scribbles. Sure didn't look like English to me.

      There's a good reason for that: the Domesday Book wasn't written in English. It was written by Norman monks as the article mentions. They wrote it in Latin. That was the language of government, the arts, and bureaucracy in those days. Old French was a strong second. And Old English, as the language of a subjugated populace, came in a distant, distant third.

      æ And even if it had been written in English, you still wouldn't have been able to read it without special training. Here is an example of Old English (from memory, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine!):

      Sume dæge hit gelamp æt an nunnan of æm ilcan mynstre geforon in on hire wyrt-tun. Ond ær heo gesawon an leahtric, and hit gelyste æs.
      Translated roughly, that means:
      It so happened that a nun of that same monastery went into their garden. And there she saw a particular lettuce, and she wanted it.
      The language has changed substantially since those days, no? And as if that weren't bad enough, styles of handwriting have changed an awful lot too. Once you get into postgraduate-level medieval studies, you get special training in reading historical forms of handwriting, the study of which is called palaeography.

      Lastly, the project is not a copy of the original Domesday Book: it was an effort to create a resource of similar utility for future historians by gathering interesting stuff from around the country and storing it in digital form. Videos, maps, and so on, as the article said. There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy. Some of it is web accessible.

      Next question!

  10. Re:Our digital heritage? by budalite · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. :})||

  11. The Professor by Flamesplash · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  12. I was 12 by Inda · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My school took part in creating the Digital Domesday book, as most schools did. We did the normal scapebook thing; pictures and stories. Only the best stuff made it in.

    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.
  13. Re:Which computer? by SpinyNorman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  14. The difficulty is hubris by eXtro · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Digital media is the easiest thing in the world to preserve. Digital data can be migrated to more modern media (casette v.s. hard drive v.s. digital video disc) with increasing efficiency with every passing generation. People have already copied data off of 5 1/4" floppies onto 3.5" floppies onto Syquest drives onto CD-ROMS. Nothing is lost in this process. A photograph of the Mona Lisa loses something over the original painting. A digital copy of a photograph of the Mona Lisa doesn't need to lose anything over the photograph.


    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

  15. Aliens by saihung · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  16. This is a fall at the first hurdle by Alain+Williams · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Think about the next few centuries for a bit:
    1. This became inaccessible after 10 years.
    2. Archaelogogists in 1000 years are likely to be interested in what we are (were) up to today, that is 100 times as many generation times as it took the Acorn to become unusable.
    3. Many of the designers of the original machines are probably still around - and able to help. They won't be in 1000 years time (insert caveat about medical advances here).
    4. The article talks about changes in hardware and software that made the old formats unreadable, how often will that change over 1000 years - especially if proprietary s/ware vendors need to churn to get upgrade fees?
    5. The data was stored on 2 video disks, not a large amount of data - quite pheasable to have a project to recover the data. What about the data that we might want to store today ? What about the data that will be generated over the next 1000 years ?
      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.
    6. Data is only useful is readable and searchable. Will a future archaeologist be willing to learn to use 100 generations of applications to look at 1000 years of archive ?
    7. Disasters happen. This data must be free so that it can be freely copied many times to many places.

    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.

  17. Re:Our digital heritage? by rodgerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  18. The BBC must have lost the backups then by epeus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.