54 
The BBC’s old Domesday Project has been brought back to life, with the broadcaster making all the submissions sent in to its 1986 Domesday Book reworking available for public viewing.
The Domesday Project Reloaded is currently on display at The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, where a huge 52″ touchscreen device has been filled with the original public submissions from the 1980s — over a million of them — plus a new batch of crowd-sourced material from 2011.
If you’re not old enough to remember what the Domesday Project was all about, it was a thing the BBC did to celebrate the anniversary of the famous Domesday Book, for which it invited the public to document their lives and surroundings to compile a modern version of the ancient guide to life in Britain.
Obviously the fact that this was done back in 1986 means it’ll all be handwritten letters and drawings from our much simpler forefathers. The data from the 1986 Domesday was saved on two LaserDiscs. That in itself tells you a lot about 1986. [BBC]
Quick show of hands. Who here was a) Alive and b) An adult back in the ancient days when this came out.
Guilty on both counts. I remember being very interested in it back in the day.
Well I guess you’re kinda on your own there then.
I’ll never understand why people insist on putting things like this on ‘new’ technologies. Pen and Paper served perfectly well in preserving records of the past all the way back to Ancrient greek times and beyond, and yet now people always get giddy about saving all this data on this new system of laser disks or dvds etc only for the format to be irrelevant in 10-15 years time. I’m all for tech, but not for this kind of record keeping, just keep it simple and it will last.
without people doing rubbish like this computers would not have developed into what we have today. Remember Acorn produced the BBC Micro that the doomseday was viewable on. Acorn went on to produce one of the first 32bit risc processors (aparently designed over a weekend be people who has never designed a cpu – that’s talent). When it was released in a computer it was the most powerful PC available. Acorn then went on to spin the CPU side into a seperate company (with apple having a stake) so apple could use the Acorn CPU’s in the Newton. This company is ARM!!!! So without Arm and early portable devices like the newton we would have nowhere near the power and functionality available in todays tablets and smartphones.
If people just said paper is fine (how many paper records and films, audio reel to reel etc. etc. have been lost due to fire, water, degradation of the media it was stored on???) A lot more than I care to think.
So Lets just say without people doing things like this and pushing the boundaries of what technology can do we would still be using ZX81′s and BBC Micros etc. We would not have mobiles, tablets, powerful PC’s, HD TV’s, Digital Cameras….
….and you sure as heck wouldn’t have a website like this to post your comment on
And it may have been new media… but look we still have it today. Paper, photos, negatives, etc degrade.
I was at primary school when this was created, I remember my school doing a submission for it.
The Beeb must have borrowed an old BBC B computer with doomsday attachment as I believe there is or was only one working example in the UK that could read the laser discs this was stored on.
Nice to see it get a more public home. Data from the very early days of home computing. That brings me to another point, I think the humble home computer was better in those days, well not from hardware and performance obviously, but it’s function in the home. I think if Sony actually bundled a good linux desktop environment with the PS3 and sold a keyboard and mouse etc. to go with it (instead of blocking an advertised feature of being able to install 2nd OS) we would have a modern version of these home computers. It would be a cheap (well compared to a reasonable spec PC) and would allow the kids to have a games machine that also let them do homework etc. etc. That is effectively what computers like the BBC B, Amiga, Risc PC, Archimedes, Atari ST were and maybe failed in the sega saturn (but it is close to what I am getting at). Games machines that also allowed people to do other work.
Maybe if sony can’t then MS can they have just done a very WP7 Windows 8 esk update to the xbox. Maybe for an OS fee they could enable a desktop OS. But then their hardware partners would hate that. So come on Sony, your PS3 or future console could form the center of an awesome home entertainment and Desktop PC all in one system. Would probably convince many more parents to allow one in the kids room as they would see it as something that also allows the kids to do their homework on
So lets make the full archive available online for everyone to see. Take the data off the laser discs and use an emulator to display if you cant convert easily
Well, they have… http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday
The table above is clearly not an archive medium either. (The web is obviously the place for that.) But the table is a great way to showcase the information in a museum or exhibitions. From the National Museum of computing…
“The new Domesday Touchtable at TNMOC sits alongside a hands-on exhibit of the original Domesday System that ran the 1986 BBC Domesday Project.” (http://www.tnmoc.org/36/section.aspx/228) So by the sound of it you can play with both the old laserdisk system and the touchtable side-by-side.