BBC Domesday Project

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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.

A new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. This included a new 'survey' of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many color photos, statistical data, video and 'virtual walks'. Over 1 million people participated in the project.

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, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. To view the discs, an Acorn BBC Master expanded with an SCSI controller and additional coprocessor controlled a Philips VP415 "Domesday Player", a specially-produced 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 4 km wide by 3 km tall, based on Ordnance Survey 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.

The National Disc contained more varied material, including all data from the 1981 census, sets of professional photographs and virtual reality-like walkarounds shot for the project. 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 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 overlaid 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 Leeds University 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 National Archives (UK) (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 the disc 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 has been [available] since July 2004 on the web.

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