Spies, Prime Ministers, And Balls: The BBC Domesday Project at 40
"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:
Decades before the modern web, the BBC Domesday Project dared to archive an entire nation using.... what else - massive LV-ROM (LaserVision Read Only Memory)LaserDiscs.
To mark the impending 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project's release, the UK's Centre for Computing History(CCH) hosted a celebration at its museum on September 19, bringing together several of the original team members responsible for the system.
One was Mike Tibbetts, an assistant to Peter Armstrong, the BBC producer behind the project. Tibbetts revealed that the UK's domestic intelligence service, MI5, took an interest in the system, but "they didn't understand a word of what we were doing!"
"And on one occasion, Peter and I had to give a presentation, or Peter gave the presentation to [former prime minister] Margaret Thatcher, and well, I'm not sure she understood what we were doing either..."
What they were doing was compiling a trove of data that will prove invaluable to historians in the years to come, even if the politicians of the era looked nervously on at the amount of data being handed over to the public.
The Domesday Project was intended to be a modern version of the Domesday Book, compiled after the 1066 Norman invasion of England. The original book surveyed most of England and parts of Wales and was used by the King to assess dues owed to him. 900 years later, the name was given to a project in which more than a million people participated to provide a snapshot of life in the UK.
Participants (many of whom were school children) contributed content, which was linked with maps, photographs, and other data. It was all compiled onto a pair of LaserDiscs - the Community Disc and the National Disc - and accessed via a BBC Master computer and a Philips VP415 LaserVision player.
Armstrong came up with the idea, and the team compiled the project between 1984 and 1986. The system was eventually released at the end of 1986, and was aimed at schools, libraries, and universities. It was, alas, not a roaring sales success - the exact price per unit is difficult to pin down, but approximately 5,000 is a fair estimate. Government subsidies lowered the cost to around 3,000, but it was still out of reach for much of its audience.
As a resource, however, it has huge value, which will only increase as the years pass. Tibbetts drew parallels to the original Domesday Book, which took centuries for historians to recognize as a vital resource. "Perhaps," he mused, "40 years is simply too short a time for historians to perceive the Domesday Project as a sufficiently distant benchmark of useful research."
Perhaps. However, while hundreds of years have passed since the Domesday Book was compiled, the years have not been kind to the Domesday Project, thanks to technology's inexorable march.
"The original Domesday Book had one huge advantage over the Domesday Project when it comes to future-proofing and longevity," explained Tibbetts. "The vellum pages of the original Domesday have been preserved for 940 years so far, and it's likely to continue to exist well into the future.
"It took very few years for the bespoke technology of the BBC Domesday Project to be overtaken by universal media technologies."
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