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The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between

Acorn Computers Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the United Kingdom, UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archi ...

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

Logica Logica plc was a multinational IT and management consultancy company headquartered in London and later Reading, United Kingdom. Founded in 1969, the company had offices in London and in a number of major cities across England, Wales and Scotl ...

, and the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

...

(with some funding from the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

's ESPRIT programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original ''

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manusc ...

'', an 11th-century

census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses incl ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. It has been cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage. This new

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new "survey" of the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and "virtual walks". The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage,

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...

tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census. Over a million people participated in the project, including children from more than 9,000 schools.

Purpose

Initially estimated to require the involvement of 10,000 schools and about one million children, the intention was to make the role of schools central in a data gathering project that would assign each school to a geographical area, have parents and local societies collect data, with the schools "acting as a focus and providing the computer". Questionnaires about geography, amenities and land use were to be completed, with school pupils and other contributors also able to write about their local area and "the issues affecting them" in their own words. In the context of the educational relevance of microcomputers and of information retrieval software operating on repositories of data that might potentially be built by children, it was felt that... With regard to potential applications of the system and of its significance, one contemporary reviewer of the system reflected...

Format

Acorn 8-bit microcomputers (cropped) BBC Master AIV

The project was stored on adapted

LaserDisc The LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium, initially licensed, sold and marketed as DiscoVision, MCA DiscoVision (also known simply as "DiscoVision") in the United States in 1978. Its diam ...

s in the LaserVision Read Only Memory (LV-ROM) format, which contained not only analogue video and still pictures, but also digital data, with 300 MB of storage space on each side of the disc. Initial estimates indicated a total storage capacity of 2 GB per disc, described as sufficient for 80,000 pictures (including satellite images) and "half a million text pages" plus software to process maps and graphical information. The delivered product was estimated to offer a "total potential capacity" of around 1400 MB with half of that capacity filled. Data and images were selected and collated by the BBC Domesday project based in Bilton House in West Ealing. Pre-mastering of data was carried out on a VAX-11/750 mini-computer, assisted by a network of BBC Micro microcomputers. The discs were mastered, produced, and tested by the Philips Laservision factory in Blackburn, England. Viewing the discs required a BBC Master AIV - an Acorn

BBC Master The BBC Master is a home computer released by Acorn Computers in early 1986. It was designed and built for the BBC, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was the successor to the BBC Micro, BBC Micro Model B. The Master 128 remained in produ ...

expanded with a

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

controller and the 65C102 "Turbo"

co-processor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography ...

- which controlled a Philips VP415 LaserVision laserdisc player. The user interface consisted of the BBC Master's keyboard and a

trackball A trackball is a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes—like an upside-down ball mouse with an exposed protruding ball. Users roll the ball to position the on-s ...

(more specifically the Marconi RB2 Trackerball rebranded by Acorn). The enhancements provided by the Philips VP415 permitted computer control and access to data stored on the discs. 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 long, based on

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grid references. Each block could contain up to 3 photographs and a number of short reflections on life in that area. Most, but not all, of the blocks are covered in this way. In addition more detailed maps of key urban areas and blocks of 40x30 km and regional views were captured, allowing "zoom-out" and "zoom-in" functions. The community disc was double sided, with a "Southern" and a "Northern" side, although country-wide data at the 40x30km level and above was on both sides. *The ''National Disc'' contained more varied material, including data from the 1981

, sets of professional photographs and

-like walkarounds shot for the project. Side 2 of the National disc contained video material. The material was stored in a hierarchy and some of it 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 addition a natural language search was provided, supported through the application of the

Porter Porter may refer to: Companies * Porter Airlines, Canadian regional airline based in Toronto * Porter Chemical Company, a defunct U.S. toy manufacturer of chemistry sets * Porter Motor Company, defunct U.S. car manufacturer * H.K. Porter, Inc., ...

stemming algorithm.

Supported platforms

The application software for the project was written in

BCPL BCPL ("Basic Combined Programming Language") is a procedural, imperative, and structured programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still ...

(a precursor to C) to facilitate portability between different hardware and software platforms, although the software required additional patches to run on the

RM Nimbus RM Nimbus was a range of personal computers from British company Research Machines (now RM Education) sold from 1985 until the early 1990s, after which the designation ''Nimbus'' was discontinued. The first of these computers, the RM Nimbus PC- ...

version of the system. An

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

version of the system was considered but not initiated.

Preservation

In 2002, there were great fears that the discs 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 JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

image compression and before truecolour computer video cards had become widely available.

CAMiLEON

However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

and

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

, led by

Margaret Hedstrom Margaret L. Hedstrom, Ph.D., is the Robert M. Warner Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information. She has contributed to the field of digital preservation, archives, and electronic records management and ...

and managed by researcher Paul Wheatley) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using

emulation Emulation may refer to: *Emulation (computing), imitation of behavior of a computer or other electronic system with the help of another type of system :*Video game console emulator, software which emulates video game consoles *Gaussian process em ...

techniques. The CAMiLEON project transferred the text and database files stored on the Domesday laserdiscs to a Linux-based computer using an SCSI connection to the player. Images, stored as still-frame video, were digitised at full resolution using video capture hardware and stored uncompressed, ultimately requiring around 70 GB of storage per side of each laserdisc. A modified version of the Free Software emulator, BeebEm, was then used to access the archived data, with enhancements introduced to support emulation of the Turbo co-processor, SCSI communication and laserdisc player functionality.

Videotape Digitisation Efforts

Another team, working for the UK National Archives (who hold the original Domesday Book) tracked down the original 1-inch videotape masters of the project. These were digitised and archived to

Digital Betacam Betacam is a family of half-inch professional videocassette products developed by Sony in 1982. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself. All ...

Domesday 1986

A version of one of the discs was created that runs on a Windows PC. This version was reverse-engineered from an original Domesday Community disc and incorporates images from the videotape masters. It was initially available only via a terminal at the National Archives headquarters in Kew, but was published on the web as Domesday 1986 (at domesday1986.com) in July 2004. This version was taken off-line early in 2008 when its programmer, Adrian Pearce, suddenly died.

Domesday Reloaded

BBC Domesday machine at Interesting 2011 (cropped)

In 2011, a team at BBC Learning, headed by George Auckland, republished much of the Community disc data in a short-lived web-based format. This data comprising around 25,000 images was loaded onto the

BBC Domesday Reloaded BBC Domesday Reloaded was a local history web site for the digitised content of the BBC's 1986 Domesday Project. It was launched in May 2011 and included some updates contributed by users during 2011. During the site's first day of public opera ...

website which went online in May 2011 and offline in June 2018, being hosted in archived form at the National Archives thereafter. The data extraction underlying the Domesday Reloaded site was carried out in 2003 and 2004 by Simon Guerrero and Eric Freeman.

Domesday86

Subsequent efforts by the Domesday86 project have taken a broader approach to preservation by attempting to preserve the technologies used to access Domesday and other interactive video content, along with the content itself, focusing on the laserdiscs as preservation artefacts in their own right. The stated objective of the group is to create hardware and software to permit the use of the BBC Domesday system without the need for the rare and expensive specialist hardware employed by the original system, also providing support for the original hardware, releasing developments under Free Software and open hardware licences.

Museum preservation initiatives

The Centre for Computing History The Centre for Computing History is a museum in Cambridge, England, established to create a permanent public exhibition telling the story of the Information Age. Overview The museum acts as a repository for vintage computers and related artefa ...

has undertaken a similar project to preserve the data from the Domesday Project and made it available online. In 2011, with the National Disc and Community Disc processed, the museum was investigating copyright issues before releasing the URL to the general public. An emulator has since been made available in collaboration with the Domesday86 project. The museum has a working Domesday system on display and accessible to the public. They also have possibly the largest Domesday and interactive laserdisc archive in the world.

The National Museum of Computing The National Museum of Computing is a museum in the United Kingdom dedicated to collecting and restoring historic computer systems. The museum is based in rented premises at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and opened in 2007. ...

based beside

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following ...

Milton Keynes Milton Keynes ( ) is a city and the largest settlement in Buckinghamshire, England, about north-west of London. At the 2021 Census, the population of its urban area was over . The River Great Ouse forms its northern boundary; a tributary ...

previously had two working Domesday systems but has retired the displays as of 2017.

Archival of material

The deputy editor of the Domesday Project, Mike Tibbets, has criticised the UK's National Data Archive to which the archive material was originally entrusted, arguing that the creators knew that the technology would be short-lived but that the archivists had failed to preserve the material effectively.

Language and regional issues

An initial decision to only support the entry of text in English for the Domesday discs led to a dispute involving Welsh schools in areas where local education authorities supported both English and Welsh as first languages: A compromise saw the BBC allowing ten pages of Welsh text that were to be accompanied by ten pages of English translation for each school submitting content in the Welsh language. With such schools effectively seeing their allocation being reduced from twenty pages to ten, some Welsh schools were apparently boycotting the project in protest at this apparent discrimination. Other concerns from Welsh schools were raised in relation to featured amenities to be surveyed by each school, these being less commonplace in rural areas, suggesting a bias towards urban areas in the design of the survey criteria. Although as many as 13,000 schools showed an interest in collecting and submitting data, these schools mainly covered urban areas, leaving "large gaps of knowledge" in rural areas, and leading the Domesday Project team to reach out to the

Women's Institute The Women's Institute (WI) is a community-based organisation for women in the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. The movement was founded in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada, by Erland and Janet Lee with Adelaide Hoodless being th ...

Scout Association The Scout Association is the largest Scouting organisation in the United Kingdom and is the World Organization of the Scout Movement's recognised member for the United Kingdom. Following the origin of Scouting in 1907, the association was for ...

, Guide Association and to farmers.

Copyright issues

In addition to preserving the project, untangling the

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

issues also presents a significant challenge. In addition to copyright surrounding the many contributions made by the estimated 1 million people who took part in the project, there are also copyright issues that relate to the technologies employed. It is likely that the Domesday Project will not be completely free of copyright restrictions until at least 2090 (assuming no further extensions of copyright terms).

Interactive video

The BBC Master-based system used to deliver the Domesday Project content, known as the Domesday Advanced Interactive Video (AIV) System, was also intended as a platform to support other interactive video applications, integrating with programming languages such as BASIC and Logo via the operating system. Opportunities were perceived for the introduction of the technology beyond the education sector and into various areas of the public and private sectors, estimating "300,000 potential business customers". Acorn set up a subsidiary, Acorn Video, offering the platform under the name Master Video with a choice of Philips or Pioneer laserdisc player for £3220, or £3750 for a more compact version. (This ostensibly followed on from earlier products: the Acorn Interactive System, based on the BBC Micro and Pioneer or Philips laserdisc player, which only supported unidirectional control of a laserdisc player via a serial link, and the Viewpoint Interactive Video Workstation.) BBC Enterprises and Virgin released interactive video discs for education. Following on from the initial Domesday content, the ''Ecodisc'' from BBC Enterprises provided an ecological simulation of

Slapton Ley Slapton Ley is a lake on the south coast of Devon, England, separated from Start Bay by a shingle beach, known as Slapton Sands. Slapton Ley is the largest natural freshwater lake in south-west England being long and has two sections; the Low ...

nature reserve designed to complement biology and ecology field trips at secondary school level. It was priced at £169 plus VAT, with one side of the disc containing the interactive content and data, the other side containing the BBC Schools Television programme ''Ecology and Conservation''. Virgin's ''North Polar Expedition'' title, in contrast to Ecodisc, provided the software to support interaction on separate floppy disks instead of as LV-ROM content. It was priced at £199 plus VAT, and was reportedly a "testbed for CDI applications" planned by Virgin Publishing. Having received one unfavourable verdict that the title offered "a tired question and answer format in what should be an innovative new medium", a response to this particular review attempted to address such criticisms by noting the limitations of the interaction method employed by the Domesday system, the tightly coupled sound and video capabilities of the medium, and the need to deliver and improve the software without involving the "expensive and complex LV-ROM mastering process". The response also questioned the future of the LV-ROM format, in contrast to Laservision and CD-ROM, also indicating that

CD-I The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I, later CD-i) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, data storage format that was mostly developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips. It was created as an extension of Compact Disc Di ...

would remove various restrictions experienced with the laserdisc medium. The BBC's ''Countryside'' disc provided various census and agricultural datasets and was sponsored by a broad consortium of public and private sector organisations. The BBC's ''Volcanoes'' disc, produced in association with Oxford University Press, featured volcanic eruption footage and animated computer graphics sequences by award-winning animator, Rod Lord, together with hypertext features. The ''Volcanoes'' disc (priced at £194.35) employed "new AIV features like hypertext" and had graphical content that was created on Archimedes computers. Shell Education Services offered an "interactive video project pack" intended for educational use in various subjects based on "a system developed by Shell UK to provide route maps in filling stations". Epic Industrial Communications offered a "complete course in solid state electronics" for the AIV system, priced at £2300 plus VAT. Support software was also made for the AIV platform such as the Domesday Display application suite which allowed users to extract data and pictures from the laserdiscs and to present them in the form of a slideshow. The Domesday Presenter application focused on Domesday and AIV system laserdiscs, whereas the Domesday Captions application allowed video frames to be selected from AIV system laserdiscs or any other CAV (constant angular velocity) laserdisc, with the user adding their own captions. Although this particular interactive video implementation had progressed away from previous "cumbersome and boring" solutions relying on the navigation of sequential-access video tape, tape-based solutions persisted as competitors. For example, the tape-based VP170 Video Presenter package from Interactive Media Resources (whose system processor was packaged similarly to an Acorn second processor) and the Companion system from Bevan Technology which could control VHS-based tape and Philips LaserVision players, both apparently offered support for integration with applications using the Microtext language. Ivan Berg Software (a one-time partner with Acornsoft on various titles) offered the Take Five system on Betamax format video tape with the BBC Micro supplying "question-and-answer frames" in interactive training course material. The Polymedia PCL 1000 also offered a combination of BBC Micro and Sony Betamax video tape recorder bundled with interface, single disc drive, colour monitor and software for £2,450. Earlier competitors included the Felix Link interface from Felix Learning Systems, supporting laserdisc, VHD video discs,

U-Matic U-matic is an analogue recording videocassette format first shown by Sony in prototype in October 1969, and introduced to the market in September 1971. It was among the first video formats to contain the videotape inside a cassette, as oppo ...

tapes, with VHS tapes promised, along with Cameron Communications' Interact B system offering touchscreen control over a

Thorn EMI Thorn(s) or The Thorn(s) may refer to: Botany * Thorns, spines, and prickles, sharp structures on plants * ''Crataegus monogyna'', or common hawthorn, a plant species Comics and literature * Rose and Thorn, the two personalities of two DC Comic ...

VHD video disc player. Acorn's success in the interactive video market was reportedly hindered by Acorn's financial difficulties of 1985 putting the company's "support or commitment" into question, even leading to the BBC taking over the development of the Domesday Project's retrieval software from Acorn. Consequently, a contract for 1500 machines with Lloyd's Bank ended up being signed by Video Logic, and other potential customers had not progressed beyond trial purchases of Acorn's machines. By early 1988, "fewer than 2,000" Domesday systems had been sold, with the total price of the system being around £5,200. However, a voucher scheme had been in operation, reducing the purchase price to £3000, and this was to be extended until the end of that year. Subsequent Acorn machines were also featured in laserdisc solutions. For instance, a system was offered by Eltec Computers and the British Nuclear Forum consisting of a BBC A3000, LaserVision 406 player, genlock card, and three discs designed by educators at Newcastle University aimed at secondary schools. The system cost £1899. Some software on the RISC OS platform also supported use of laserdisc players such as the ''Key Plus'' data collection and analysis software for the educational market. Oak Solutions' ''Genesis'' product supported use of laserdisc hardware, with ''The Battle of the Somme'' title, produced by

Netherhall School The Netherhall School and The Oakes College is a mixed secondary school and sixth form located in the Queen Edith ward of Cambridge, England. Its logo is a modified version of the arms of the City of Cambridge. It is one of the largest schools ...

in conjunction with NCET and the Imperial War Museum, incorporating "Laservision material which really brings the project alive" and offering "potentially a new beginning for that old Domesday system".

References

External links

BBC - Domesday Reloaded
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bbc Domesday Project Domesday Project, BBC Acorn Computers LaserDisc Multimedia works British digital libraries Geographic region-oriented digital libraries 1986 in the United Kingdom Domesday Book