BBC Domesday Project

If you&#x27;re visiting London, head north on the train for about 30 minutes and visit the museums at Bletchley: Bletchley Park itself, which documents the British WW2 codebreaking effort, and is amazing, and next door to it the National Museum of Computing, which has samples of basically every computer ever made, most of which you can play with, and which is amazing. (They have a working decatron decimal-based computer! Which you can play with! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;photos&#x2F;FiTQAM8VkPknCAJR7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goo.gl&#x2F;photos&#x2F;FiTQAM8VkPknCAJR7</a>)<p>But they <i>also</i> have a BBC Micro lab, complete with a Domesday Disc setup. Which you can play with. It&#x27;s surprisingly usable.

This was a bit like &#x27;Google Street View&#x27; (extremely-lite) in that there were a couple of pictures of the village I grew up in on the Laser Discs. We had the whole kit and caboodle at school, plus, during holiday times (3 months of Summer), we could borrow the BBC Micro part to take home!!! This was what got me into programming 6502 assembler. All told, including the Domesday Project part, this was an extraordinary education effort by schools, the BBC and Acorn from which many oaks did grow.<p>The laser discs themselves were a bit like gold disc LP records - 12&quot; sized and expensive looking. I believe there were video games in arcades that had the same technology going on with moving pictures rather than still frames.<p>As a whole though the Domesday content was a bit like Encarta and other multimedia CDs that came out when CD-ROM was a thing. Much like Encarta et al., one felt slightly disappointed at the lack of depth to the knowledge&#x2F;information provided, thank goodness Wikipedia took off.

I remember getting involved in this when I was at school. It was part of the inspiration behind <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geograph.org.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geograph.org.uk&#x2F;</a> where we set up a free archive of geographical-themed pictures of the UK.<p>Back in around 2005 I contacted the original project leader to see if we could somehow help with the preservation, but at that time it was thought sorting through the copyright issues would make it impossible. I was happy to see it was eventually released online!<p>Long term archival was a concern for Geograph - aside from adopting a cc-by-sa licence on image submissions, we also worked with the National Archives to ensure a digital copy of the image archive is preserved.<p>The Domesday project occupies what seems now - the briefest window of opportunity - to create something that would become obsolescent so quickly! But I think its true value lies in acting as a warning to others...

They have a web version made in 2011, where you can compare the 80s pictures with 2011 pictures (looking at some places I know, they have already changed a lot since then, perhaps we need a 2016 version!).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;history&#x2F;domesday" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;history&#x2F;domesday</a>

It&#x27;s pretty shameful that so little effort was apparently put into preserving these. Why bother doing this if they&#x27;re going to just put them on a disk and let them rot for 30 years. As data become more sophisticated it seems to be harder and harder to archive them in formats that aren&#x27;t obsolete within a few years. I can go to The National Archives and look at a document that&#x27;s nearly 1000 years old (or visit <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;opendomesday.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;opendomesday.org&#x2F;</a> ), but the &quot;new&quot; version is unreadable less than 30 years later. What can be done about this? I&#x27;m assuming people must be investigating future-proof archival formats.

I was a young graduate at Logica when this had just been completed, and sat near a guy who was maintaining it. In what was then a largely &quot;VT-100 world&quot; it was pretty cool.

Really interesting, seems like copyright is the main problem. No-one had thought about that then, or the possibility of making the whole thing universally accessible on the internet rather than sitting it in an archive.