Ohhh......

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/domesday/

For those who don’t know, the BBC Domesday project was a snapshot of the UK in the 1980s. It was circulated using a modified BBC Master, running a laser disc system. Unlike vellum, this technology became obsolete very quickly, and attempts to get the data from this disk has been hapmered by:

• Not many systems capable of reading the data (the BBC Domesday system was quite pricey)

• Laser disks deteriorating

• A mix of binary data and analogue video streams on each disc

• Rights to use the material - a lot of the material was gathered with no releases signed - so effectively the material was owned by the contributor

All of this has made getting the data off the ancient format an into a form which is more future proof. It appears that the BBC has overcome these obstacles.

There's a lesson here about digital formats, y'know...

Yep, the world changes. If it needs an external reader, it isn't going to last.

Even paper only lasts a few hundred years on average, some has been carefully cared for, or lost in an environment that has preserved it, to some extent...

Heck, even stones wear away over millenia.

There is no known medium that will last in perpetuity.

A Doomsday project must live, evlove, be constantly recoded... Which isn't going to happen either.

You could argue the entire interwebz is a modern day Domesday Project. It continually grows, evolves, changes with technology, and yet remains mostly still completely accessible.

Vellum seems to be the most sturdy medium of the “paper-like” substances. Laws in this country are still written on the stuff. It still ages, but it does so in a less destructive way than paper does.

I’ve just looked at some of my old machines, and getting data from them onto a readable format that can be used today is tricky.

According to Rory Cellan-Jones on Twitter, the launch is imminent.

It’s now live.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday