The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between
Acorn Computers
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England in 1978 by Hermann Hauser, Christopher Curry (businessman), Chris Curry and Andy Hopper. The company produced a number of computers during the 1980s with asso ...
,
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...
,
Logica
Logica plc was a Multinational corporation, multinational information technology, IT and Management consulting, management consultancy company headquartered in London and later Reading, Berkshire, Reading, United Kingdom.
Founded in 1969, the c ...
, and the
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
(with some funding from the
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...
'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 at the behest of William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by ...
'', an 11th-century
census
A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...
of
England
England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...
. It has been cited as an example of
digital obsolescence
Digital obsolescence is the risk of data loss because of inabilities to access digital assets, due to the hardware or software required for information retrieval being repeatedly replaced by newer devices and systems, resulting in increasingly ...
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 (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...
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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
, 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 Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...
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

The project was stored on adapted
LaserDisc
LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. It was developed by Philips, Pioneer Corporation, Pioneer, and the movie studio MCA Inc., MCA. The format was initially marketed in the United State ...
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 prod ...
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, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...
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 or ...
- 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 (computing), mouse with an exposed protruding ball. Users roll the ball t ...
(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
Ordnance Survey
The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see Artillery, ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of ...
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
census
A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...
, sets of professional photographs and
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a Simulation, simulated experience that employs 3D near-eye displays and pose tracking to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video gam ...
-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 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., a locom ...
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 f ...
(a precursor to
C) for portability between different hardware and software platforms, although the software required additional patches to run on the
RM Nimbus version of the system. An
Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...
version of the system was considered but not initiated.
Concerns over electronic preservation

In 2002, concerns emerged over the potential unreadablility of the discs as computers capable of reading the format became 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 ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...
image compression and before
truecolour computer video cards had become widely available.
In November 2023, a podcast episode by Tim Harford, "Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc," from the series ''
Cautionary Tales'', described and contextualized many of the troubled issues surrounding the historical trajectory of the BBC Domesday Project's data.
CAMiLEON (2002)
However, the BBC later announced that the CAMiLEON project (a partnership between the
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...
and
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...
, led by
Margaret Hedstrom
Margaret L. Hedstrom is an American archivist who is professor emerita of informationat the University of Michigan School of Information. She has contributed to the fields of digital preservation, archives, and electronic records management.
...
and managed by researcher Paul Wheatley
) had developed a system capable of accessing the discs using
emulation techniques. The CAMiLEON project transferred the text and database files stored on the Domesday laserdiscs to a Linux-based computer using a 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 (2003)
Another team, working for the UK
National Archives
National archives are the archives of a country. The concept evolved in various nations at the dawn of modernity based on the impact of nationalism upon bureaucratic processes of paperwork retention.
Conceptual development
From the Middle Ages i ...
(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.
...
.
Domesday 1986 (2004-2008)
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 (2011-2018)
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 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 (2020)
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 (2020)
The
Centre for Computing History
The Centre for Computing History is a computer 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 rel ...
in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...
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 UK-based museum that is dedicated to collecting and restoring historic computer systems, and is home to the world's largest collection of working historic computers. The museum is located on Bletchley Par ...
based beside
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and Bletchley Park estate, estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), that became the principal centre of Allies of World War II, Allied World War II cryptography, code-breaking during the S ...
in
Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes ( ) is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in Buckinghamshire, England, about north-west of London. At the 2021 Census, the population of Milton Keynes urban area, its urban area was 264,349. The River Great Ouse forms t ...
has a working Domesday system in its BBC Micro Classroom for visitors to use.
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 organization 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 the ...
,
Scout Association
The Scout Association is the largest organisation in the Scout Movement in the Scouting in the United Kingdom, United Kingdom. Following the rapid development of the Scouting, Scout Movement from 1907, The Scout Association was formed in 1910 ...
,
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 legal 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, ...
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 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 optical disc data storage format as well as a hardware platform, co-developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips and Japanese company Sony. It was created as an extension of CDDA ...
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, also known as -inch Type E Helical Scan or SMPTE E, is an analog recording videocassette format developed by Sony. First shown as a prototype in October 1969 and introduced commercially in September 1971, it was among the earliest vi ...
tapes, with
VHS
VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, introduced in 1976 by JVC. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s.
Ma ...
tapes promised, along with Cameron Communications' Interact B system offering touchscreen control over a
Thorn EMI
Thorn EMI was a major British company involved in consumer electronics, music, defence and retail. Created when Thorn Electrical Industries merged with EMI in October 1979, it was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituen ...
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-sex education, 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 ...
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
Domesday onlineBBC - 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