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."

Comments

Something else this reminds me of

[Raul654]

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?

Re:Something else this reminds me of

[burns210]

" 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)."

The cool thing about that project is, they can't say "stay the f*** out" because in 100,000 years people won't be speaking english, or if they somehow did, it would have evolved so much that the warning wouldn't mean anything... This project has to use nonverbal, non-language based warnings, something that would scare you away....

i am actually reminded of Planet of the Apes, with all the scarecrow looking guys were hangin to warn apes away from the forbidden land....

But where is it...?

[mccalli]

I submitted the original Domesday story (the old one referred to), and I noticed this new bit of news yesterday.

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

Great idea!

[Raul654]

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?

Re:Your forget one thing though

[Raul654]

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.