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Digital Domesday Rescued By Emulation
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Dec 02, 2002 02:35 PM
from the good-thing-it-wasn't-palladium-protected dept.
from the good-thing-it-wasn't-palladium-protected dept.
eefsee writes "The BBC announced that the Digital Domesday project which had become unusable has now been revived thanks to the successful emulation of a 1980's era Acorn computer. Folks at Leeds University and University of Michigan did the emulation work. This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage. Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years."
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Digital Domesday Rescued By Emulation
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Re:Which computer? (Score:5, Informative)
Or more accurately:
The British Broadcasting Company (the BBC) wanted to build a microcomputer in the early 1980s which they could use as part of their effort to promote national computer literacy. The idea was to have a standard machine that they could use in their TV shows - and viewers could buy one of their own and learn to use and program it by watching the shows.
After approaching several UK computer manufacturers they settled on Acorn. At the time Acorn were a leading supplier of micros, notable the Acorn Atom. The BBC contracted Acorn to produce a new more advanced version of the Atom which was designed and manufactured by Acorn but sold as the BBC Micro.
The BBC Micro was never sold as an Acorn machine, indeed Acorn produced their own rival (and much less successful) machine called the Electron.
So your equation is not strictly true, but its close.
Re:Which computer? (Score:5, Informative)
DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
See? This is why we need DRM. If there were proper DRM going on then of course it would have been recoverable! We would just need the exact system(nope, can't change the processor, or the video card, or the hard driver) in order to recover it!
See, doesn't DRM help us all?
</sarcasm>
Re:DRM (Score:5, Funny)
Region Error
Interesting to think.... (Score:3, Insightful)
So why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's so hard (Score:5, Interesting)
A schematic does not contain all of the information needed to build a device, either. Seeing, for example, that a 2N2222 bipolar NPN transistor is required for an amplifier isn't going to be too useful in the year 2100, I would bet. And the paper those semiconductor companies use for those big thick spec books? that crap turns yellow and falls apart in 10 years!
Our digital heritage? (Score:3, Funny)
If something is truly of importance, it will be ported forward to new technologies before the existing technology becomes so out of date that recovering it becomes a Herculian effort, or it will also co-exist in a more future-proof medium. Otherwise it's simply dead data that's more than likely never going to have a need to be accessed again.... not every bit needs to be held forever.
Would the world have stopped turning if this little chunk of history gone unrecovered? No. Are there other forms of media (books, videos, music) from the 1980's that would have answered the same questions about culture and society that the data in this archive answers? Definately.
Re:Our digital heritage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Our digital heritage? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, we don't miss any of the treasures of the Roman empire lost under Constantine, Justinian and his successors when the newly ascendant Christians went on a Taliban style orgy of destruction, smashing up anything they considered "pagan" or "unacceptable".
And scholars of Rome *certainly* don't miss any of the works held in the libraries of Rome that were destroyed by the Gothic invaders before the so-called dark ages.
Nor does anyone regret that poverty striken Icelanders took to using ancient manuscripts for dress patterns and firelighters in the 19th century. Nope, didn't lose much there at all.
Hell, we don't even miss all those Egyptian writings destoryed in the 19th century. Or by the Aswan Dam project.
And of course, accidents never happen. Just forget about that little fire in the Library of Alexandra.
I genuflect to your superior wisdom and knowledge.
What about next time? (Score:5, Insightful)
'The software and hardware needed to access the Domesday discs is to be deposited at the Public Record Office once the project is completed.'
This is all fine and good, but it has already introduced the problem we'll face in approximately 2015:
We're going to have to create an emulator for the emulator.
And so on, ad infinitum. What we really need is some universally acceptable method to store digital data that isn't likely to decay or fall out of favor in the next ten years. That, I'm afraid, is a difficult proposition.
I just hope the emulator's emulator works.
Re:What about next time? (Score:5, Informative)
Project Gutenberg's done it for a while.
It's called "ASCII."
Readily convertable to dead-tree format by every printer. Ever. Backward and forward portable on every 7- and 8-bit machine in existance. Ever. Readable on any screen by well over 1/3 the world's population. Can convey an immense amount of information.
(They didn't have images in their records for the last 2000 years; frankly, if something's really So Important That It Must Be Saved, it can be done in the good queen's English.)
If you just take a disk and don't do any crazy filesysteming, just write one big honking text file sequentially to it, and mark down somewhere on the top that it functions in 8-bit units, well, it doesn't take too much effort to figure out how to write a driver for it to port it to the next media that comes along.
(Or just print it out. After all, high quality acid-free paper, stored in a vault somewhere, has a shelf-life measureable in centuries. Not too shabby.)
Re:What about next time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless, the problem mentality is pretty well represented in your post. The assumption in the 80s was to make the discs like the book - make them last forever. The trick with digital is to assume the media and format will expire, become obselete, etc. To preserve the data they should have planned for this (migrating data, etc) instead of keeping the old book mentality of preserving a relic forever.
The Curse of History (Score:5, Interesting)
It is very much easier to educate a person according to the curriculum you desire if contradictory information is not available, especially regarding the history of a place. The extreme example is that of the Pol Pot regime. But you also see it in a newspaper when they fire all of the old hands who know where the bodies are buried, and only the young bucks are around who can be easily stampeded. No institutional memory.
On another note - if you want to damn a politician to history, make sure to get those stone obelisk and stelli erected with heavy engraving. Make sure some are out in the desert so that they are properly preserved.
Archeologists will come by centuries later and will take what you say as truth. Or at least very seriously. Have a field day.
the digital data will have disappeared, and the testimony on your stone monuments will be one of the few surviving original source records from the era.
Ulimate Revenge (Score:4, Funny)
I can see it all now. LUGs getting together to make testimonial stone glyphs testifying to the Ages their opinions of the character of their least favorite politician or software company.
You get the idea. Also applies to politicians.
have a blast. Have it placed on you tombstone or something. or in the side of a cliff.
Abandonware (Score:4, Funny)
Rumor has it that MAME 0.7 [mame.net] will support it.
Original Domesday is not quite accessible (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. I saw one volume of the Domesday book at the White Tower back in 2000. It was sealed under a sealed glass box, and you could only look at the two pages it was turned to. I would have tried to get access to it under the box, but there were these guards that looked quite intimidating and they kept saying "Move along..."
Even then, I could barely make out the cryptic scribbles. Sure didn't look like English to me.
At least with a digital version they can make infinite copies of it and distribute it to anybody interested, unlike the paper version locked up under a glass box.
Re:Original Domesday is not quite accessible (Score:5, Informative)
There's a good reason for that: the Domesday Book wasn't written in English. It was written by Norman monks as the article mentions. They wrote it in Latin. That was the language of government, the arts, and bureaucracy in those days. Old French was a strong second. And Old English, as the language of a subjugated populace, came in a distant, distant third.
æ And even if it had been written in English, you still wouldn't have been able to read it without special training. Here is an example of Old English (from memory, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine!):
Translated roughly, that means: The language has changed substantially since those days, no? And as if that weren't bad enough, styles of handwriting have changed an awful lot too. Once you get into postgraduate-level medieval studies, you get special training in reading historical forms of handwriting, the study of which is called palaeography.Lastly, the project is not a copy of the original Domesday Book: it was an effort to create a resource of similar utility for future historians by gathering interesting stuff from around the country and storing it in digital form. Videos, maps, and so on, as the article said. There have been some electronic editions of medieval texts, notably the sole remaining manuscript of the poem Beowulf, which was written down in the early 1100s. Alas, it is proprietary, and you have to pay a rather large sum to the British Library if you want a copy. Some of it is web accessible [uky.edu].
Next question!
The Professor (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, and I thought the Professor was all that by making a radio out of a coconut. A computer in an acorn? DAMN!
I was 12 (Score:5, Interesting)
I also remember see the finished version in the Natural History museum (or was it the Science museum?). It had one of those Marble Madness balls on the front for navigating - great fun.
If they put this online it will make a good read.
The original is here. [domesdaybook.co.uk]
The difficulty is hubris (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that people don't look any further than right here, right now. All that's required to preserve digital data for future generations to revere or vilify is an effort to keep migrating it onto future media and to publish the method of reading the data along with it. Software formats come and go, there are probably software packages that can't even reliably read data using older versions of that software package.
The specification for the format in which the data is stored is the Rosetta Stone of the 21st century. Make this open and data can live in perpetuity.
Aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a fall at the first hurdle (Score:5, Insightful)
To be kept available future data archives will need to be copied over and over. They will have to be copied in bulk, there will not be the man power to do specials on anything.
What am I trying to say: this problem will get worse, worse than you can imagine. Well defined, simple Open standards for data is a must for the basics. Well defined, simple Open standards for Open Source applications to implement anything richer - these applications growing gradually over time, but maintaining backwards compatability. I still use troff and can still maintain/print documents that are over 15 years old.
A proprietary future will be much poorer than an Open one. A future that overly controls copying will be much poorer than an open one.
All of the numbers above are probably an underestimate.
Yet another reason to use open source (Score:3, Insightful)
As the GNU project says, "source code" is the preferred form for modification of a work. For this project, the source code for the display program might be BASIC or assembler, but that's not important. What's important is the text/image/video/audio content, and the source form for that content might be XML PNM (no lossy compression), uncompressed AVI and WAV files.
Converting the original, BBC-Micro specific program into a modern source format will eliminate the need for a special or unique system to access that content.
Furthermore, distribution costs on the Internet approach zero, so that work can be made widely available to everybody, not just a few schools or visitors to a museum.
Over time our popular formats such as JPEG and AVI files will become obsolete, so the work must be converted into that newer form in future, possibly ad-infinitum. At least those future conversions will occur from one well-known and popular format into another.
They haven't really learned from their efforts, have they?
So here's the new reason to use open source: It is important to preserve our digital heritage, and using source code is the best means we have of making works accessable and compatible with the computers of the future.
Similar situation at SLAC (Score:3, Informative)
Back in the day(TM) before RDBMS were a commodity, SLAC used the SPIRES database written at Stanford running on an IBM Mainframe. Well, as these things go, the IBM Mainframe was getting long in the tooth, but there was a ton of data in this SPIRES database. SPIRES wasn't going to get ported to anything modern. I forget who exactly, but one engineer just up and decided to write an emulator for the IBM mainframe in practicly no time at all.
Now the SPIRES database is still running. However, it now runs on Solaris using a home-brewed IBM Mainframe emulator. Even though it's in emulation, it runs faster than it ever used to on the real deal (Moore's Law and all).
As a side note, the first truly useful web site was here at SLAC when George Crane and Paul Kunz hooked up a web front end to the SPIRES database so the High Energy Physics community could easily get at other's papers.
The BBC must have lost the backups then (Score:5, Informative)
When we left the BBC, they had all the original Video data on Broadcast quality masters, and all the digital data preserved on VAX tapes. They must have thrown those out in the intervening 12 years (which wouldn't surprise me).
I know of two former MMC directors who have CD-ROM backups of the digital data and working Domesday systems.
Which is not to decry the work in emulating it - that si the real long-term answer. The Church-Turing thesis is the ultimate refutation of DRM too.
Re:Domesday? (Score:3, Informative)
"The first approach to a modern assessment roll or cataster is the well known Domesday Book."
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/domesday1
"The Domesday Book was ordered by William the Conqeror to assess the value of his conquered kingdom 20 years after defeating Harold at the Battle of Hastings."
http://www.villagenet.co.uk/history/1086-domesd
Re:Domesday? (Score:5, Informative)
The Domesday book was commissioned in December 1085 by William the Conqueror, who invaded England in 1066. The first draft was completed in August 1086 and contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time).
The book has nothing to do with the "doomsday" world-ending yadda, it was mainly set up to inform the king of how much tax monies he should have been receiving.
Find out more [domesdaybook.co.uk].
Re:Domesday? (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright? On a book written nearly a thousand years ago?!
Re:Domesday? (Score:4, Funny)
Stupid Sonny Bono...
Re:Domesday? (Score:5, Informative)
Excepting that they're the same word, just the language has evolved in the intervening millenium.
I could rape the previous
Re:Phew (Score:3, Insightful)
The BBC wanted a micro which they could use in their educational stuff. They went to Acorn, who was a successful manufacturer of the Atom [planet.nl], and basically they agreed that the next generation computer, which was to be called the Proton could be called the BBC Micro. This gave Acorn exposure and extra sales, and the BBC the machine they were looking for. For about a decade, you saw BBC micro's popping up in BBC shows including Dr Who. Acorn later made the Electron, and then the Archimedies, before going bankrupt.
Therefore the BBC do not own the copyright on the ROM's in the BBC micro.
Re:What the hell is this? (Score:3)
No.. no you didn't RTFA. Because if you had you would have seen this:
And, also this:
So, what it is is an inventory of England. People and culture. Please don't say you RTFAd if you didn't, and then don't ask for more information when you say you don't care.