BBC Domesday Project
Encyclopedia
The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips
, Logica and the BBC
(with some funding from the European Commission
's ESPRIT programme) 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
on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
This new multimedia
edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new "survey" of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. Children from 9,000 schools were involved. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and "virtual walks". Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage, virtual reality
tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.
s in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analogue video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. Data and images were selected and collated by the BBC Domesday project based in Bilton House in West Ealing. Pre-mastering of data was carried out on a VAX-11/750
mini-computer, assisted by a network of BBC micros. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by Philips at their Eindhoven headquarters factory. Viewing the discs required an Acorn BBC Master
expanded with a SCSI
controller and an additional coprocessor
controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially produced laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a trackball
(known at the time as a trackerball). The software for the project was written in BCPL
(a precursor to C
), 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:
by the computer system's graphical interface. The project had begun years before JPEG
image compression and before truecolour computer video cards had become widely available.
However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON
project (a partnership between the University of Leeds
and University of Michigan
) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation
techniques. CAMiLEON copied the video footage from one of the extant Domesday laserdiscs. Another team, working for the UK National Archives (who hold the original Domesday Book) tracked down the original 1-inch videotape masters of the project. These were digitised and archived to Digital Betacam.
A version of one of the discs was created that runs on a Windows PC. This version was reverse-engineered from an original Domesday Community disc and incorporates images from the videotape masters. It was initially available only via a terminal at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, Surrey, but was published on the web in July 2004. This version was taken off-line early in 2008 when its programmer, Adrian Pearce, suddenly died.
The deputy editor of the Domesday Project, Mike Tibbets, has criticized the UK's National Data Archive to which the archive material was originally entrusted, arguing that the creators knew that the technology would be short lived but that the archivists had failed to preserve the material effectively.
The Centre for Computing History
has undertaken a similar project to preserve the data from the Domesday Project and make it available online. They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public.
The National Museum of Computing
based at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes has two working Domesday systems accessible by visitors to the Museum.
republished much of the Community disc data in a web based format. This data comprising around 25,000 images was loaded onto the BBC Domesday Reloaded
website which went online in May 2011. The data extraction underlying the Domesday Reloaded site was carried out in 2003/2004 by Simon Guerrero and Eric Freeman.
issues also presents a significant challenge. In addition to copyright surrounding the many contributions made by the estimated 1 million people who took part in the project, there are also copyright issues that relate to the technologies employed. It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms).
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
, Logica and the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
(with some funding from the European Commission
European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
's ESPRIT programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book
Domesday Book
Domesday Book , now held at The National Archives, Kew, Richmond upon Thames in South West London, is the record of the great survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086...
, an 11th century census
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...
of England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence
Digital obsolescence
Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project...
on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
This new multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new "survey" of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. Children from 9,000 schools were involved. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and "virtual walks". Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage, virtual reality
Virtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.
Format
The project was stored on adapted laserdiscLaserdisc
LaserDisc was a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision in North America in 1978, the technology was previously referred to interally as Optical Videodisc System, Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Optical...
s in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analogue video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. Data and images were selected and collated by the BBC Domesday project based in Bilton House in West Ealing. Pre-mastering of data was carried out on a VAX-11/750
VAX-11
The VAX-11 was a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture . The VAX-11/780 was the first VAX computer.- VAX-11/780 :...
mini-computer, assisted by a network of BBC micros. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by Philips at their Eindhoven headquarters factory. Viewing the discs required an Acorn BBC Master
BBC Master
The BBC Master was a home computer released by Acorn Computers in early 1986. It was designed and built for the British Broadcasting Corporation and was the successor to the BBC Micro Model B. The Master 128 remained in production until 1993....
expanded with a SCSI
SCSI
Small Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives, but it...
controller and an additional coprocessor
Coprocessor
A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor . Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, or encryption. By offloading processor-intensive tasks from the main processor,...
controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially produced laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a trackball
Trackball
A trackball is a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes—like an upside-down mouse with an exposed protruding ball. The user rolls the ball with the thumb, fingers, or the palm of the hand to move a cursor...
(known at the time as a trackerball). The software for the project was written in BCPL
BCPL
BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.- Design :...
(a precursor to C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
), 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 4 km wide by 3 km long, based on Ordnance SurveyOrdnance SurveyOrdnance Survey , an executive agency and non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom, is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, producing maps of Great Britain , and one of the world's largest producers of maps.The name reflects its creation together with...
grid references. Each block could contain up to 3 photographs and a number of short reflections on life in that area. Most, but not all, of the blocks are covered in this way. In addition more detailed maps of key urban areas and blocks of 40x30 km and regional views were captured, allowing "zoom-out" and "zoom-in" functions. The community disc was double sided, with a "Southern" and a "Northern" side, although country-wide data at the 40x30km level and above was on both sides. - The National Disc contained more varied material, including data from the 1981 censusCensusA census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...
, sets of professional photographs and virtual realityVirtual realityVirtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
-like walkarounds shot for the project. Side 2 of the National disc contained video material. The material was stored in a hierarchy and some of it 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 addition a natural language search was provided via an English stemming and matching algorithm to a set of keywords.
Preservation
In 2002, there were great fears that the discs would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer. Aside from the difficulty of emulating the original code, a major issue was that the still images had been stored on the laserdisc as single-frame analogue video, which were overlaidGenlock
Genlock is a common technique where the video output of one source, or a specific reference signal from a signal generator, is used to synchronize other television picture sources together. The aim in video and digital audio applications is to ensure the coincidence of signals in time at a...
by the computer system's graphical interface. The project had begun years before JPEG
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
image compression and before truecolour computer video cards had become widely available.
However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON
CAMiLEON
The CAMiLEON project was a joint undertaking by the University of Michigan and the University of Leeds to develop and evaluate a range of technical strategies for the long term preservation of digital material suffering from digital obsolescence...
project (a partnership between the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
and University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation
Emulator
In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...
techniques. CAMiLEON copied the video footage from one of the extant Domesday laserdiscs. Another team, working for the UK National Archives (who hold the original Domesday Book) tracked down the original 1-inch videotape masters of the project. These were digitised and archived to Digital Betacam.
A version of one of the discs was created that runs on a Windows PC. This version was reverse-engineered from an original Domesday Community disc and incorporates images from the videotape masters. It was initially available only via a terminal at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, Surrey, but was published on the web in July 2004. This version was taken off-line early in 2008 when its programmer, Adrian Pearce, suddenly died.
The deputy editor of the Domesday Project, Mike Tibbets, has criticized the UK's National Data Archive to which the archive material was originally entrusted, arguing that the creators knew that the technology would be short lived but that the archivists had failed to preserve the material effectively.
The Centre for Computing History
The Centre for Computing History
The Centre for Computing History is a museum in Haverhill, Suffolk, England, established to create a permanent public exhibition telling the story of the Information Age. It is believed to be the only museum in the United Kingdom dedicated to exploring the social impact of computers.The museum acts...
has undertaken a similar project to preserve the data from the Domesday Project and make it available online. They already have data from both the National Disk and Community Disk online and are currently investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public.
The National Museum of Computing
The National Museum of Computing
The National Museum of Computing is a museum in the United Kingdom dedicated to collecting and restoring historic computer systems. The museum is based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England, and opened in 2007...
based at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes has two working Domesday systems accessible by visitors to the Museum.
Domesday Reloaded
In 2011 a team at BBC Learning, headed by George AucklandGeorge Auckland
George Auckland is a UK television and digital media executive, now retired after a long career at the BBC. During his time as a BBC executive he worked on some of the key educational landmarks in British interactive media including the BBC Micro computer and the BBC Networking Club...
republished much of the Community disc data in a web based format. This data comprising around 25,000 images was loaded onto the BBC Domesday Reloaded
BBC Domesday Reloaded
BBC Domesday Reloaded is a local history web site for the digitised content of the 1986 BBC Domesday Project. It was launched in May 2011 and includes some updates contributed by users during 2011.-History:...
website which went online in May 2011. The data extraction underlying the Domesday Reloaded site was carried out in 2003/2004 by Simon Guerrero and Eric Freeman.
Copyright issues
In addition to preserving the project, untangling the copyrightCopyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
issues also presents a significant challenge. In addition to copyright surrounding the many contributions made by the estimated 1 million people who took part in the project, there are also copyright issues that relate to the technologies employed. It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms).
External links
- BBC - Domesday Reloaded
- Domesday Preservation Group -- took over the domain of the online Community Disc port.
- National Archives, information on Domesday Disc project
- A lengthy history of the project and its recovery
- Domesday Project information - describing current status
- CAMiLEON Project homepage
- More on CAMiLEON
- Countdown from Domesday: a report on the CAMiLEON Emulation and BBC Domesday Conference, December 2002
- British enthusiast who built a Domesday Project machine from original parts
- Working Domesday System at The Centre for Computing History
- Domesday System Preservation Project
- Your Computer news article, December 1984
