Digital Domesday book unlocked

The Digital Domesday book, a project which I vaguely remember participating in at primary school or seeing on Blue Peter, has been recovered from the ‘interactive video discs’ it was stored on. To acheive this, Leeds and Michigan University researchers developed emulators for both the Acorn computer and the obsolete video disc player. One would have thought that someone might have saved one of the players - the scribes of the original Domesday Book had the sense not to write in code requiring a cipher designed to self-destruct in 1096. Interestingly, the BBC seem to have caught on: their Book of the Future is an online collaborative project to collect our visions of life in 2020. Once all the submissions are in, the data will be published as a… book. Not a website, not a DVD, certainly not a proprietary ‘interactive video disc’ format.

Update: more from the BBC on how Digital records ‘obscure the past’

Posted at 11am on 03/12/02 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
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