Museum Helps Domesday Reloaded Project

purehavnet writes "For many months the volunteers at the Centre for Computing History have been working on capturing and preserving the data from the BBC Domesday System. A complete set of data from the community disc was supplied to the BBC, who have now released the Domesday Reloaded project. This allows most of the community data from the original system to be viewed online."

Comments

Ah, Domesday.

[Anonymous Coward]

...That final, ultimate end when the Earth will be covered by giant... domes.

Re:Ah, Domesday.

[SeaFox]

Not only that, this is Domesday Reloaded. Where the mechanical squid make their coordinated assault on the domes that protect us.

"update this picture"

[Hazel Bergeron]

Please tell me that it adds rather than replaces. Also, where is the downloadable copy? All I want is a copy of the laserdisc etc.

And the UI is a noisy, muddled pain. There were fewer distractions in 1986.

Re:"update this picture"

[Serious Callers Only]

Please tell me that it adds rather than replaces. Also, where is the downloadable copy? All I want is a copy of the laserdisc etc.

A more pertinent question would be - where can I get a working copy of the hardware to play the laserdisc?

This update is long overdue, and so long as all the data is there, the web is a far better place for this project, as someone else (you for example) can take all the data and repackage it with a better UI and redistribute, which couldn't be done with the original analogue files without a huge amount of extra hassle and a working version of the original hardware/software, which in 100 years will be forgotten and obsolete.

Interesting that the rosetta stone of our age may be impermanent bits which are replicated, copied and modified ad infinitum on the web, rather than more permanent marks on stone. That's until the lights go out of course. Unfortunately the original laserdiscs are neither permanently readable (stone), nor conveniently accessible (web), so they are the worst of both worlds.

Re:"update this picture"

[locofungus]

All I want is a copy of the laserdisc etc.

Much of the data on the laserdisc is analogue. The images definitely are.

Even the digital data is stored in an audio track - not sure if it was played through the cassette port of the BBC micro to decode or whether the laserdisc hardware did the decoding.

Tim.

Re:"update this picture"

[Gordonjcp]

No, the digital data is not stored on an audio track. It's stored as digital data, with the modified Laserdisc player appearing as a SCSI disk.

Re:"update this picture"

[Going_Digital]

Well to be accurate the data is stored on the part of the disc that would normally be used for audio. The text data is Digital but the images are analouge a lot more info here http://www.microcomputer.org.uk/projects/domesday.html

Re:"update this picture"

[itsdapead]

All I want is a copy of the laserdisc etc.

Probably wouldn't do you much good - the Domesday system used a new "standard" called LV-ROM which stored analogue video and digital data on the laserdisc. I think that the format was only ever used by Domesday and one or two other educational projects. So even if you've got a lasevision movie player stashed away for whenever you want to see Han shoot first it won't get at the data. LV-ROM players had a SCSI interface - Other laserdisc players just had a RS232 interface for computer-controlled playback.

Also, the way you design software for laserdisc-based "Interactive Video" is very different from "modern" multimedia: your computer has fairly crappy graphics with a genlock/overlay card which superimposes them on the analogue video output from the laserdisc. The laserdisc is recoreded at constant angular velocity, so its basically 1 frame/2 fields per revolution, giving perfect freeze-frame and frame-accurate random access. So, wherever possible you pre-rendered all your graphics and on some expensive specialist video graphics setup and recorded them statically on the disc.

I didn't work on Domesday, but I worked on another educational interactive video project and I can tell you that large sections of the discs would make no sense whatsoever as linear video - and the affordances of the system greatly affected the design of the software. E.g. there was a 3D maze-building game with every possible forward view pre-rendered as a few frames of video... which meant it was cunningly designed so that you could only see the length of the corridor and any branches to your immediate left and right - otherwise rendering [thinks] 2^16+2^12+2^10+... frames for an 8x8 maze might have got tedious. In other parts we were utilizing the ability to step through video perfectly in 1/25 sec steps to get kids to calculate speeds etc.

I guess now it would be possible to simulate the whole system in software with uncompressed or MJPEG video...

School essays

[Relyx]

They essays that accompany each grid square remind me of the pieces we were made to write at school. Unsurprising really as a vast number were contributed by British school children back in the eighties. The everyday banality is quite interesting, as the world has moved on a great deal since then.

Re:School essays

[Inda]

I beleive one of my pieces of 'work' was included on the disk. I remember looking for it on the original Domesday machine, which was probably in the Natural History Museum.

Now if only I could remember what I wrote.

Re:School essays

[LizardKing]

I remember this project from my school days too. The swotty kids were involved in submitting data for the project, and eventually a setup consisting of BBC computer and laser disc player appeared. Those of us who hadn't been involved eventually had a look at it, and the reaction was pretty much "so what". By that time, the technology had already been used for computer games, and the Domesday data set didn't really excite us. When the Archimedes computer arrived, that was a different matter though - mainly because of a couple of neat games it came with. In short, if the Domesday project was in part aimed at exciting an interest in computers amongst school kids, then we were well ahead of the teachers.

Re:Immigrants

[Hazel Bergeron]

I don't know if you were alive in the '80s but "beating with a stick", aka caning, was fairly standard in regular (almost always Christian, though not necessarily very religious) private schools back then, and in state schools not much earlier. Some of my earliest school memories are of the slower kids being hit with a ruler.

Re:Pity it isn't still done today..

[Viol8]

Hilarios pal. But unlike people like you I don't need to justify my beliefs anymore - the proof is out there on the streets. When left wing fuckwits like you eventually wake up to the problems you've caused it'll be too late. If it isn't already.

Re:Pity it isn't still done today..

[Viol8]

I wasn't talking about hitting the slower kids but the badly misbehaved ones. And yes , it did make them behave. But lets not let facts get in the way of your self righteous little feelgood post.

Re:Don't Panic!

[Tim C]

Well, I'm 36 years old and have lived in Britain all my life, and neither I, nor any of my family, nor the majority of my friends have had any significant trouble. Britain really is mostly harmless, frothing at the mouth tabloid headlines to the contrary.