BBC Domesday Project
The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th
century census of England. It is
frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence.
A new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and
published in 1986. This included all the information from the original survey plus modern spellings of the place names, maps, and
many color photos, video and 'virtual walks'. Over 1 million people participated in the project, with thousands of school
children contributing material.
The project was stored on adapted laserdiscs in the LaserVision
Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analog video and still pictures, but also digital data. To view
the discs, an Acorn BBC Master expanded with an SCSI controller and additional coprocessor
controlled a Philips "Domesday Player", an adapted laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC's keyboard and a
trackball. The software for the project was written in BCPL to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise
suggested it might.
The project was split over two laserdiscs:
- The Community Disc contained personal reflections on life in Britain and is navigated on a geographic map of Britain.
The entire country was divided into blocks that were 4km wide by 3km tall, based on Ordnance Survey grid references. Each
block contained at least 3 photographs and a number of short reflections on life in that area.
- The National Disc contained more varied material, including all data from the 1981 census and virtual reality-like walkarounds. The
material was stored in a hierarchy and could be browsed by walking around a virtual art gallery, clicking on the pictures on the
wall, or walking through doors in the gallery to enter the VR walkarounds.
In 2002, there were great fears that the disc would become unreadable as computers
capable of reading the format had become rare (and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer). However, the BBC later
announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between Leeds University and University of Michigan) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation techniques. Unfortunately, this data is not yet publicly accessible due to
copyright constraints.
While there are difficulties accessing digital data from 1986, the original Domesday book, now over 900 years old, can still
be consulted. This problem has renewed interest in ensuring long-term access to digital information.
External links
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