The BBC Domesday Project: not dead, just resting.

ozpass

Anyone watching BBC's 'Tomorrow's World' circa 1986 might remember the Domesday Project. A huge, ambitious archival project akin to the original "Domesday Book". It featured a LaserDisk player controlled by a modified Acorn BBC Master with a SCSI interface, Genlock for video overlay and a trackball style controller. One of these things came up for auction on Ebay recently but I had to drop out of the chase at £350 sterling. God alone knows what it eventually sold for- probably in excess of a grand. The content's making a comeback though- check the news excerpt below:

DIGITAL DOMESDAY BOOK GETS NEW LIFE

The BBC's computer-based, multimedia version of the famed Domesday Book
has received a new lease on life, thanks to scientists at Leeds
University and the University of Michigan, who have found a way to
access the archive stored on 1980s-era interactive video discs. To
unlock the now-obsolete technology, the Camileon project teams have
developed software that emulates the Acorn Microcomputer system and the
video disc player. "BBC Domesday has become a classic example of the
dangers facing our digital heritage," says project manager Paul
Wheatley. "But it must be remembered that time is of the essence. We
must invest wisely in developing an infrastructure to preserve our
digital records before it is too late. We must not make the mistake of
thinking that recording on a long-lived medium gives us meaningful
preservation." The information on the Domesday discs has been
inaccessible for 16 years. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, an
inventory of England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks, is in fine
condition in a London Public Record Office. (BBC News 2 Dec 2002)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2534391.stm

Mercury_Tilt

This post has been deleted.

sceptre

The Sunday Times ran a story a few months back in the Doors supplement highlighting the problem with reading the old discs.

Glad to see the data can be brought back from the dead - I was very interested in the project when Tomorrows World first featured it.

ozpass

I hadn't realised what a gargantuan amount of data was involved in the Domesday Project. The individual who coded the software which emulates the DDP hardware (Richard Gellman) informs me that the disks contain the following data:

324 Mb Data Image
+ 54,000 frames per disc _side_ at 768 x 576 x 24bit each
+ 1k of Disc Shape info

= 67 Gb per disc side.

Apparently there were at least a million people involved in the project.

The hardware that was emulated to read the disks is as follows:

Standard 128K RAM/128K ROM BBC Master 128 with:
Internal 64K 65C102 Co-Processor at 3Mhz
Modified SCSI interface board - (Modified from Acorn Winchester Hard Drive Host Adapter board)
SCSI Bus
LV-ROM Player with both digital data interface and video control interface
(both through vendor unique SCSI commands)
5-mode Video Mixer
22Khz Stereo Audio Mixer

Quite an accomplishment!

ozpass

Here's the project website:

http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/domesday/domesday.html

Very interesting stuff.