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Digital Domesday Defies Doom
Hulver writes "The BBC Domesday project, originally completed in 1986 and under threat (as reported in this old slashdot story) has had its data recovered. The contents of the laserdiscs have been put on DVD, and new programs written so that PCs can access the data. Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. Full details of the recovered data are at the Public Record Office website."
This article reminds me of something else I read - that the DOE is currently paying good money for people to help design a warning for Yucca Mountain (the giant nuclear storage facility out in Nevada). That one has to last as much as 100,000 years, albeight it has to store a lot less information (stay the F*** out). I wonder what kind of overlap there would be between the two?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The first thing that struck me when I went over was...where's my copy? This was put together as an educational tool using public money, but now there's only one copy of it in Kew Gardens, London? Why can't I just download it? All the data's public domain anyway.
As it happens, I don't live that far from Kew Gardens and so will probably go to see this. But what I'd really like to do is download the lot and use it as a referece tool at home. Or perhaps accessible online.
Incidently, no word on the formats used to rescue it. It now has a Windows interface - good news, but what about people running other things? That's not a trite statement - they already came close to losing it once in just fifteen years, and in fifteen more years' time I'll guarantee you that it won't be XP on people's desktop. Need to have the formats available so that people can write their own interfaces to it.
Cheers,
Ian
I think you've hit on a really insightful idea. I'm reminded of a quote from Newsradio: "You can't take something off the Internet - it's like taking pee out of a pool."
The guarenteed way of protecting data against time is to make lots and lots of copies. The internet is the perfect medium for that. So yes, why don't they put it on the internet?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Sorry for another reply to my own post, but here's a great resource for seeing how the language has changed over time. It has .wav readings of beowulf. The reason I keep citing beowulf (no, I don't have some computer-cluster fetish) is that it is basically the only surviving example of old-english, or so I was taught. If you listen to it, you can really see how in just 1200 years, the language has totally changed.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...in a perfect vacuum, and someone discovered it thousands (millions?) of years later, would it still work? (provided there was power for it, some type of solar, perhaps?)
well, I made some of the entry for the village of Wickenby, near Lincoln, with a childhood friend, Ann. We both had BBC computers at home so we sort of got co-opted into typing some stuff. As children of farmers we concentrated on that side of life in the area. Sweet innocent times...
Rob.
RetroBeep, a retrocomputing museum at Bletchley Park (near Milton Keynes, close to London) has the VL-reader and a BBC micro. The proprietor (John Sinclair, whose son is also active at the site) discussed the Domesday project when I was there in May 2003. I'm not sure if there's a copy of it there, but they did have the hardware, and were trying to connect one device to the other.
Also note that in england at that time domesday was a regular, repeating, day on when judicial decisions were announced which essentially could not be appealed. Just like the book could not. So one can argue of the christian judgement referenece is all that accurate and if it was not the other way round; the christian references was named after the every day scheduled judgement day in normal life.
Perhaps.
Dw
Actually, there are good theoretical reasons why data would be more prone to degradation if it's in an analog rather than digital format. Of course, in practice, analog also degrades a lot more than a digital signal, just because you can't keep the analog media pristine.
While not precisely true, an analog format has essentially continuous resolution. That means that even a shift in an atom is enough to change the data (albeit to a miniscule degree). From the laws of thermodynamics, we know that entropy increases, and so you get thermal noise constantly changing things around. Digital data, on the other hand, is much better insulated against this kind of noise. The digital signal, being on-off, requires a substantial change (50%) of the signal level.
This isn't even considering the fact that you can perform error correction on digital data in a meaningful way (which is how you can get away with scratching a CD-ROM and obliterating thousands of bytes of information without loss). You can't perform error correction on analog data in any meaningful way, because the amount of information you'd need to correct would be essentially infinite.
The benefit of analog is that it has essentially continuous resolution--it can degrade a lot more than digital, and yet still offer a superior copy of the original data (image, sound, whatever), at least as long as it lasts. Anyone else find it somewhat ironic that the BBC is transferring data for archival purposes from an analog source to a supposedly better format... again?