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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."
Let's see how quickly it happens.
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
Read your history and learn about the Domesday [sic] Book. It's not a mistake.
YFI
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
"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. "
.flac, so I can be laughing in the distant future when everyone has crappy mp3s just because they wanted to save some space decades ago when 700 meg was a lot.
This is why I have all my CDs stored as
graspee
Language drifts and changes. Pick up a copy Beowulf, circle AD 800. Chances are you won't understand a whole lot, it's written in old english. What with the great vowel shift, the meanings of most of those words have significantly changed. Now, instead of 1200 years, imagine what 100,000 years of language evolution would do to such a warning. That's why ANY warning they choose will probably be pictoral, not script.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Seriously. I really think that a couple of hundred thousand mechanically activated (or perhaps solar so they come awake when they're dug up?) landmines are the answer.
Yes, there'll be a few casualties, but by god what ever our pig ignorant descendents make of the situation, they'll be wary investigators. Death is a pretty fucking good keep out sign, and probably a lot less loss of life will result than if they carve their way inside and start wearing uranium as jewelery from the ancient gods...
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
michael, you font of knowledge you. I wondered what the hell 'defeation' was so I Googled it. I must say I understand what Google is suggesting.
...re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained.
That's great as long as the film hasn't degraded to worse than the quality of the laserdisc images and the resolution is there to begin with.
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
Domesday Book, vellum and ink, still readable after 900 years.
Domesday Book II, Laser disks and computer files, in need of rescue after 17 years.
Progress ?
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
Check the link, it is "Domesday".
...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?)
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?
Becasue they are stupid, probably.
The ironic thing is that because they have decided to convert it to a proprietary Microsoft format, they will probably have to repeat the exercise in another 15 years. Bloody idiots.
Backup. It's just like having the original .wav files, so if anything happens to the CD you have a perfect backup copy. You get all the benefits of it being digitized as well, you can play it in it's full audio glory on your computer/stereo, you can FTP or transfer the tracks in a format that is a clone of what is on the disc, but with a nice time-saving amount of compression. Also when the CD format dies out you have the digital file sitting around on your HD, which will no doubt be the way we store our media in the future. Your question is similar, (albeit with a few important differences), to asking "Why keep around the full rip of your DVDs? You already have the DVD. Why not just make a divx and leave it at that?" Quality is important, disk space is cheap, and there's nothing like a perfect backup when you are serious about archiving.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
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.
It's clear that any specific format will last for a while and then be obsoleted within a decade or so.
Therefore transferring the information from format to format automatically as new and cheaper solutions arrive. This means a process and to simplify and reduce costs, some automatic tools to do the job.
There are hierarchical storage management[1] solutions around which can do this for you, Tivoli do quite a good one, but, because we're talking long term, the software really also needs to be cross platform and open source.
[1] http://itmanagement.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HSM.html
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
I was at school when the Domesday project was being built, in fact my school was one the schools responsible for covering part of Carlisle in Cumbria.
Our school bough one of the Domesday kits and on the first day all the teachers were bringing us through in to the library class by class to show it off. This was until one of the teachers dropped one of the discs and it shattered, bearing that in mind I am very surprised there are still discs in woking order after all this time.
I would hope now that they will work on some of the other discs that used the Domesday hardware. I vividly remember a disc that featured an interacitve film. Basically the topic was about wathching a group of kids mucking around and every 2-3 minutes it would freeze and various options would appear over the characters, e.g "Simon calls Peter stupid". Depending on what you chose (using the track ball) the film would take a different path, either they would all go home happy or they would end up in some sort of trouble. Never mind the brainwashing apsects of the film (i.e. don't misbehave kids), the technology was trail blazing. This was in 1987! Years before DVD and even now I've seen very few interactive DVD films.
Aparently there was over an hour of film and 4 possible endings to a 15 minute program on one of those discs. Whats more the system was very quick and totally foolproof.
As an 11 year old obsessed with technology I was in awe of all this fancy equipment, Domesday wasn't just a great archiving project it also introduced some fancy technology which even today seems new fangled.
What the BBC and their partners should have done is to add new material to the Domesday archive every 5 or so years. As well as the obvious enrichment of the archive, this would also mean there was a chance to update the technology in steps in order to keep track with data storage devlopements. Instead once it was finished it was forgotten about, meaning 15 years later when people realise the value of the project you have to get university's on board to make sense of the storage medium, data and software. That would have been a much better way to preserve the data.