Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 362.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 07:00:04 +0000
From: "Al Magary" <al@magary.com>
Subject: Old computer technology resurrected from 1980s
BBC Domesday book resurrected
Boffins recreate extinct technology to read 1980s discs
By Nick Farrell
VNUnet.com, December 3, 2002
<http://www.vnunet.com/News/1137300>http://www.vnunet.com/News/1137300
The BBC's Domesday book project has been resurrected from technical death
by researchers.
The huge digital archive of life in the 1980s was stored on two interactive
video discs that could be accessed using a special BBC microcomputer system.
But the discs outlived the computers they were stored on, and could not be
read by today's machines.
Now, however, researchers on the Camileon project - based at Leeds
University and the University of Michigan in the US - say they have cracked
the discs.
They have developed software which emulates the obsolete BBC computer and
video disc player and makes the material accessible on a modern computer.
Developed to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the 1086 Domesday book, the
BBC's project formed a snapshot of life in the UK during the mid-1980s.
More than one million people were involved in the project, including
photographers, journalists, academics, researchers, Ordnance Survey
mapmakers and statisticians for the UK Census.
[See also the BBC story at
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2534391.stm>. --WM]
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