Games - BBC Domesday Project

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	Games - BBC Domesday Project

The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence.

A new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. This included all the information from the original survey plus modern spellings of the place names, maps, and many color photos, video and 'virtual walks'. Over 1 million people participated in the project, with thousands of school children contributing material.

The project was stored on adapted laserdiscs in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analog video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. To view the discs, an Acorn BBC Master expanded with an SCSI controller and additional coprocessor controlled a Philips "Domesday Player", an adapted laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC's keyboard and a trackball. The software for the project was written in BCPL to make cross platform porting easier, although BCPL never attained the popularity that its early promise suggested it might.

The project was split over two laserdiscs:

The Community Disc contained personal reflections on life in Britain and is navigated on a geographic map of Britain. The entire country was divided into blocks that were 4 km wide by 3 km tall, based on Ordnance Survey grid references. Each block contained at least 3 photographs and a number of short reflections on life in that area.
The National Disc contained more varied material, including all data from the 1981 census and virtual reality-like walkarounds. The material was stored in a hierarchy and could be browsed by walking around a virtual art gallery, clicking on the pictures on the wall, or walking through doors in the gallery to enter the VR walkarounds.

In 2002, there were great fears that the disc would become unreadable as computers capable of reading the format had become rare (and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer). Aside from the difficulty of emulating the original code, a major issue was that the still images had been stored on the laserdisc as single-frame analogue video, which were overlaid by the computer system's graphical interface. The project had begun years before JPEG image compression and before truecolour computer video cards had become widely available.

However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between Leeds University and University of Michigan) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using emulation techniques. Rather than copy the video footage from one of the extant Domesday laserdiscs, the team tracked down the original 1-inch videotape masters of the project. These were scanned and archived to Digital Betacam.

In collaboration with the National Archives (UK), a version of the disc was created that on a Windows PC. This version was initially available only via a terminal at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, Surrey but has been since July 2004 on the web (only the Community Disc is available).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for BBC Domesday Project ]

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