1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival

mccalli writes :"Thought people might find this amusing. In 1986, the UK compiled an electronic domesday book. They used BBC Master computers to do it, and the result was put on laserdisc. I actually used this project whilst at school. This article states that nothing can now read these merely 15-year old discs. The original, written approx. 1086, is still doing fine thank you very much." Sounds like a good candidate for Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. (Speaking of Sterling, the "graying cyberpunk" has an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle on the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference called "Information Wants to be Worthless" -- thanks to reader ag3n7.) Update: 03/03 19:38 GMT by T : That's "domesday" not "doomsday."

Doomsday? DOMESDAY

Domesday, not doomsday...BIG difference. Domesday compiled basically a census of 'who's who' in England. Doomsday means we all go boom or something. That's sort of an important thing to get right.

Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY

Actually, "Domesday" IS an old spelling of "Doomsday" (and the book was also referred to as Domesdei). It referred to the fact that the census was both unavoidable (EVERYONE was examined), and a final verdict--in other words, if the Domesday book said that Hugh de Montfort owned the castle at Saltwood (which, if anyone cares, he did), then he had the full weight of the law behind him. Any brothers or cousins who came forth to dispute that would, in theory, be ignored.

The humor of the title probably wasn't appreciated by many of the people chronicled in it, as the study was carried out on the orders of William I, who had just conquered them. It was, in many ways, an inventory of what he had just gained by beating the Saxons and taking their lands.

Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY

Infact it did mean day of judgement, just not by G-d but by the King and his tax collectors. William the Bastard (AKA William of Normandy) had just taken over England, and he wanted to know what he had and more importantly how much it should pay in taxes. It historicly a very interesting document, and you probably can find large parts of it on the web. In both the original Latin and in Modern English.

Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY

This is getting more than a little nitpicky, I know, but here's the authoritative version:

Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English [amazon.com] glosses 'dom' as 'judgment' and 'dæg' as 'day' ('dæg' being just the pre-invasion West Saxon spelling of 'day'). '-es' in 'domes' is just the genetive singular inflection for masculine nouns. So "Judgment's Day" is the closest you'll get. 'Domdæg' is actually the original (10th century West Saxon) Old English term, literally translating as "judgment day", in the Mitchell and Robinson text.

A caveat: Because the word 'Domesday' was written post-invasion, it's technically Middle English, but comes directly on the heals of the Old English period and so has more to do with King Ælfred's language than Chaucer's.

I took part in this.

I was about 10 at the time, and myself and about 3 schoolfriends survayed places like Westmarsh in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. It was quite goog really. I think it was organsied by the childrens TV programme "Blue Peter" or something. Obviously a waste of time retrospect, but still fun for a ten year old.

Should have used

They should have used microdots or long lived microfilm, or really anything other then electronic media. For longevity sadly uou need something tangible.

Does anybody actually care?

Does it really matter if the disks are unreadable? If the data wasn't important enough that somebody didn't say, "hey, we need to transfer this stuff to new media," then maybe it's not such a big deal. At a minimum, I presume that it means that the data wasn't being used by anyone, or they'd have noticed that it was about to become unavailable.

Re:Does anybody actually care?

If the data wasn't important enough that somebody didn't say, "hey, we need to transfer this stuff to new media," then maybe it's not such a big deal.

That's probably true in this case, but with more and more "cultural works" being stored on digital media, I suspect case like this one will become more frequent in the future.

The thing that should make you really worried, though, is that simply transferring the stuff to new media might not even be possible.

Have you copied your VHS tapes to DVD yet? Oh, wait, you can't -- it's Macrovision protected and Macrovision filters are illegal. (This is already the case thanks to the DMCA.)

Will you copy your audio CDs to audio DVDs? Oh, wait, you can't read them in a computer, a computer that could copy them will be illegal by the time CDs are outdated (thanks to the SSSCA).

Yes, sure, all of the data will still be available in some central location at the publisher. But what if Disney forgets about some movie, just like someone forget about this laserdisc? How many content has already been lost thanks to online news services going out of business or corrupting their database or whatever, simply because none of their readers stored the content on his hard disk?

I assume that a large amount of online content has already been lost. Maybe [put some failed .com here] published a great article two years ago, which is now not available on the web any more, but someone still has a copy of it. Unfortunately that someone cannot legally publish it, thanks to copyright legislation. Yes, it can be published in about 90 years, but will that someone still live then? Will he have copied the data to his new computer whenever he got one? Will it even have beem possible for him to copy the data, or will an SSSCA-like computer have prevented that?

We'd better care

It's even more than cultural work. Scientific work can be lost. Just because something is unimportant now, doesn't mean that it won't be in the future.

Take the case of the Aloutte satellite that was launched in 1967.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/8434/essay. htm
It collected tons of information about the ionosphere and stored that information on now obsolette tape. At the time, the information was processed and condensed and placed in an archive.

There are tonnes and tonnes of these tapes. Twenty years later, historical information on the o-zone layer became important. Since the original Aloutte researchers weren't looking for o-zone data, they never bothered to analyze that data. The only way to do that is to go to the original tapes.

The problem is, only a few machines can read these tapes and since the tape readers are *extremely* slow by todays standards, it will take years to transfer all that information to CD. What's worse is that some of the tapes are already worn out, so a good deal of information will be lost.

Just imagine what would have happened if the ancient greeks were so advanced that they stored all their information on CDs. We'd never get out of the dark ages, because people lost interest in preserving knowledge while Rome was crumbling.

All of Aristotle, Euclid, and other scientist's work would be on CDs that no-one knew how to read. No-one would even know what the CDs were for. They'd get as much respect as AOL CD, being used as frisbees, placemats, decorations, or just thrown in the trash.

WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII

While I believe the main topic deals with the lack of hardware to read the laserdisk, the same applies to any document written today. Will there exist tools in 'n' years that will read Word documents written 5 years ago?

This is exactly why Don Knuth developed TeX. He was concerned about the life expectancy of documents such as this.

His idea was to write your documents in plain text (the lowest common denominator) and use a processor to convert them to whatever format you need 'today': postscript, html, or whatever.

It may not be as sexy as WYSIWYG, but it will *always* work.

Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII

Your mistake, which is something that apparently happens to a lot of people, is that when you discarded the hardware used to read your electronic data, you did not transfer that data to a new medium. You simply discarded the hardware and forgot about the data. There's nothing suprising about this. It would be like selling your house and forgetting to move your furniture out of it, and then moving into a new house and saying, "Damn! I forgot the furniture, and now the owners of my old house have it!".

Media devices not information

"We're lucky Shakespeare didn't write on an old PC."

I can still access WordPerfect files from an old home computer from 1987. That computer still has a floppy drive which I can write files to. It still has the capability of connecting a null modem up to it for file transfer. Granted, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's still accessible.

There HAVE to be some laserdisc readers someplace in the UK that can read this. The point they're probably making is 'be wary of putting too much faith in technology'. That's a good attitude to have, but simply putting a bit more thought into keeping the data available in multiple formats would help ensure no loss of access. Hell, this was a multimillion pound project - they couldn't burn any of this to conventional CDs too? Yes, you couldn't run out to Dixon's or BestBuy and get a CD burner for $100 like today, but I'd have thought a bit more technology was available to a multimillion pound project.

"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "

Yes, the desktops might, but the data won't. Put the data in normal, documented data formats, and put them on regular drives, CDs, ZIP disks, DVD, whatever. Don't put all your digital eggs in one basket, should be the lesson. OR, simply have a technology upgrade plan in place for data that is important enough to outlive the media on which it is contained. Data that was worth millions of pounds at one time should merit a stipend of a few thousand pounds a year to keep it accessible.

Long Now Project

Although more well know for its clock project the long now foundation [longnow.org] is also looking at this problem.

I thought the original goal of the doomsday project was to allow every school in the UK to have a copy. So there should be a BBC Master hooked up to a laserdisc player in almost every school ?

How did "Voyager" do it?

For Long Life (and I don't mean the clothing/hair products advertisements ;-), look to either empirical evidence, or other fields. The oldest surviving written information we have is carved in stone or drawn on stone. Cave drawings, the Rosetta Stone, various tablets and artistic carvings... I could go on.

Voyager (and Pioneer, if I remember rightly) made use of etched metal plates. None of this biodegradeable paper stuff, or indeed any other messaging mechanism that needs some middle translation layer between medium and understanding, beyond of course the natural interpretive layer we assume the eventual reader will have - the same way we can view a painting or listen to a song without understanding the language or thought flow of the originator.

Why the obsession with "new media"? The content on the internet will not remain in its current form forever, nor will CDs, DVDs, Laserdisks, 8-channel cartridges, Compact Cassettes, Vinyl LPs, etc. They're great, perfect for the here and now - but if we want to leave something for posterity, better Keep It Simple, Sirs.

What is this?

If anyone was like me and had know idea what this book is check here:

www.domesdaybook.co.uk [domesdaybook.co.uk]

Sorry, I posted this once already and typoed the link.

Original article somewhat contentious

The Observer article from which this is drawn is here. [observer.co.uk]

From that article:

Betamax video players, 8in and 5in computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 3in disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible.

Needless to say, the term redundant simply means that using standard equipment you'd have problems reading this data. But specialist media recovery firms maintain old machines and there are several that will convert your old 3-inch Amstrad disks or that Betamax wedding recording, for a fee.

The Domesday 1986 disks are undoubtedly difficult to access without specialist equipment, and that's the real problem--eventually any nascent technology will become obsolete and data will be lost. Eventually it will no longer be economic for data recovery companies to maintain their obsolete machines.

Paul Wheatley: "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."

If they have any sense they'll store most of it on fiche and store that in good conditions.

This is what bothers me about DVD copy protection

Eventually we will move on from this format. I have about 40 movies in DVD format, and it'll probably eventually beat out my VHS collection (at ~700).

I'm hoping that once we move on to yet another larger format that there are some countries free enough that I can download a program that will allow me to move the DVDs to the new format.

Oxidization also bothers me.

Source article

The ananova story is a strangely stilted summary of this Observer story [observer.co.uk]

Paper? Be careful...

The problem with paper is that only highly specific types of paper are all that durable over many years. Most normal kinds of paper that you typically see have a high acid content, which causes them to yellow and then disintegrate with age. Your average paperback book will start to crumble in a few decades or so, most newspapers even earlier. I have quite a few paperbacks that are about 20 years old (which is when I started buying my own books), and they have definitely started to yellow and turn brittle even though they have been stored in a dry, clean, reasonably climate-controlled place (i.e. my living room).

Acid-free paper can also deteriorate over time, especially if handled a lot (since sweat from fingers also contains acids and bacteria) or just exposed to the air (which is also slightly acidic in normal circumstances, especially if the air is at all polluted), and also depending on the kind of inks used. Soy inks, which are increasingly popular with mass-printed media, may decay or fade over time (though they have not been in use long enough to know for sure); offset inks can also turn acidic if not properly mixed and/or discolor over time.

So it's not as simple as just "printing on paper". You need to use specially-produced acid-free (slightly alkaline) paper; use a non-acidic ink with a chemically stable pigment; and store it in climate-controlled conditions, where it can't be handled or even breathed upon.

Ironically, parchment and soot ink have proven remarkably stable over time. So long as parchment books were not stored in overly bad conditions (too damp or in polluted air), they held up for many hundreds of years with no trouble.

In a way, this story comes as no surprise to anyone who's interested in calligraphy and medieval history -- take a look at the books in museums, like the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Museum or the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin, and they look amazingly bright and fresh some 1300 years after they were made.

Those monks wanted to write for a very long posterity, and stumbled on just the way to do it -- sheepskins (vellum) and ink out of bone black.

If you're interested in medieval writing materials, check out these pages:

Ink Recipes [regia.org]
Handmade Paper -- Archival Paper [handpapermaking.org]
Medieval Manuscripts [swaen.com]

Cheers,

Ethelred [grantham.de]

Wow, this brings back memories

I remember when this was being compiled, and when my school first received one. We had a number of BBC micros and masters around the place, and I was the person they always called upon to set things up - then, as now, computers terrified a lot of people.

The Domesday Book on laserdisk was pretty neat; you could look up pertinent details for your local area, and it formed the basis of a lot of good history projects. IIRC, it had some primitive hypertext facilities.

I'm absolutely positive that this could be resurrected if needs-be. Enough copies of this went out to schools that finding a readable laserdisk shouldn't be a problem, and there has to be a working reader somewhere. I seem to remember that the data wasn't in any particularly obscure format, so mounting it on a BBC Master and sending it to a different machine shouldn't be too difficult.

If needs be, one could probably export the whole thing and mount it via a hacked BeebEm.

What will future people find of us in 10,000 years

Look around at what we have that will last 10,000 years... Nearly nothing will last that long. All the plastic, all the books, all the concrete will be dust. Metals will all corrode away to nothing. Even if a DVD would last that long, the encryption in it would prevent it from being read. Imagine if egyption hyroglifics had been encrypted too. We would know nothing about them at all. And most source code and data is compressed, can you imagine trying to figure out LZW compression without knowing anything about it.

We only build things to last 100 years at most anymore. And most things get torn down long before that. The only thing we make that lasts longer than that is our toxic waste.

Can you imagine how suprised a future archielogist will be when they dig into some radioactive waste that is still active in 10,000 years? Lethally suprised. *L* Maybe there will be legends of curses on people who dig in ancient sites? Kind of like the curse of the mummy.

There may have been civilizations before that were just as advanced as our own. When they collapsed they may have simply vanished with nary a trace in just a couple of thousand years. It isn't as hard as you think. A 1 mile wide asteroid hits the earth, dust obscures the sun for a few years so that all the plants die and the people fight and die for the few remaining scraps of food.

I often wonder if maybe the few real UFO's that are seen and the aliens that we hear about are visitors from space colonies that these previous civilizations managed to place on the moon or in the asteroid belt. If they aren't all the feverored imaginings of half crazy people.

Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye

A team of programmers including a 15-yr old broke the DVD encryption within a few years - I am sure that humans 10k+ years from now will be able to replicate that same type of work!

However, said team had some idea of the purpose behind that shiny silver disk, and some idea of what the plaintext should look like.

Consider 12000 CE.
You're an archaeologist, and you find a shiny silvery disk approximately 10 flurburbs in diameter. What is it for? It has some markings on one side that your specialist in dead languages tells you says, "Porky's 2: The Next Day". The other side apparently functions as a diffraction grating.

Now what?

Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye

I was thinking this very thought the last time that I was in Las Vegas. After an armageddon or something, all data of our civilization would be lost. The nevada sand storms would cover and preserve the Luxor hotel. The future civilization would dig and find the huge pyramid. What would they think went on there? It must have been some sort of religous gathering place for the slaves. And what of the significance of the Sphinx in front of the Luxor? Is it pointing to the other, slightly older Sphinx in what used to be Egypt? This one group of people must have migrated via a frozen channel or something. Or maybe they had aliens helping! What else could explain it? There is no evidence that this ancient civilization had any other high technology. { it is all dust now }

hehehe

Encrypted computer data will lead us into a new dark age of information if people are stupid and decide to archive books and artwork digitally and destroy the originals. Tablets and oil paintings are more effective to document history.

--Jeff

Information vs POPULAR information

Shakespeare's work was never in danger of becoming "obsolete" and "unreadable" because it was popular.

Think about it. Pick a very popular recent source of art.. say, the Beatles. How many formats is their work stored in? In how many languages? Really, this is a good argument for Peer-to-Peer media sharing systems. It takes media that society considers important and replicates and archives it all over the world..

Much how popular folk songs have been passed from generation to generation via spoken or sung words, current media is being passed around the globe and stored on everything from hardcopy to harddrives to optical media.

The only information we have to worry about losing is that which is forgotten by the masses.. for it is in danger of not being replicated and passed around.

obsolete desktops.

I had a desktop computer 15 years ago. I can still read the media from it. Granted, 5 1/4 floppy drivess aren't exactly sold new in stores anymore, but I guarantee I can still find one if I need to. I worry more about the media itself being unreadable due to age rather than not having the required equipment to read it.

Is it really such a difficult project to simply upgrade your digital storage as time goes on? Even though people might see this as a waste of time, consider your savings in storage. Converting old media, especially old magnetic tapes (think nasa) to newer, longer lasting, and SMALLER media formats, just makes sense. Nasa isnt' going to suddenly quit collecting data, its going to continue. The savings in physical storage space alone would make it worth the effort. The fact that this information will then continue to be accessible for generations to come is just a benifitial side effect. :)

-Restil

Original Domesday was on display in 2000.

They had the original Domesday book on display at the White Tower for the millenial celebration.

I stood in line for 30 minutes so I could see it, and I can assure you it is not perfectly useable. First of all you have to know Latin and how to read really bad handwriting.

You're also not allowed to take pictures of it, and if you try to do that or even touch the book these guys with guns point them at you and say "Don't you dare."

I'd have better chance at decrypting DVDs, or reading the Windows source code than using the original Domesday book.

The 1986 version was beautiful

There can't be many /.ers who got their hands on this thing, but I did. It was a big ol' honking LD, silver thing the size of an LP, with a big box to play it. It had a beautiful UI where you could click on the map and zoom & move around in in a totally intuitive way. When you got down real close to a town or neighborhood, the explanatory text was all written by fifth-graders in a set of school projects - it was flat and unstylish but very vivid. It was so beautiful that I literally got tears in my eyes the first time I used it.

A working version IS available

Last time I was there, the Science Museum in London had a working setup. All they have to do is figure how to hook it up to a CD burner and problem solved :)