
BBC Domesday Project - monort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
======
david-given
If you're visiting London, head north on the train for about 30 minutes and
visit the museums at Bletchley: Bletchley Park itself, which documents the
British WW2 codebreaking effort, and is amazing, and next door to it the
National Museum of Computing, which has samples of basically every computer
ever made, most of which you can play with, and which is amazing. (They have a
working decatron decimal-based computer! Which you can play with!
[https://goo.gl/photos/FiTQAM8VkPknCAJR7](https://goo.gl/photos/FiTQAM8VkPknCAJR7))

But they _also_ have a BBC Micro lab, complete with a Domesday Disc setup.
Which you can play with. It's surprisingly usable.

~~~
ErrantX
The NMC is a hidden gem. They let you pay a reduced entry fee to see the Heath
Robinson machine and Colossus (which is what everyone visiting Bletchley Park
wants to see). I've always thought that was a shame because so many people
don't get to see the rest of the museum (which is mad, and brilliant).

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Theodores
This was a bit like 'Google Street View' (extremely-lite) in that there were a
couple of pictures of the village I grew up in on the Laser Discs. We had the
whole kit and caboodle at school, plus, during holiday times (3 months of
Summer), we could borrow the BBC Micro part to take home!!! This was what got
me into programming 6502 assembler. All told, including the Domesday Project
part, this was an extraordinary education effort by schools, the BBC and Acorn
from which many oaks did grow.

The laser discs themselves were a bit like gold disc LP records - 12" sized
and expensive looking. I believe there were video games in arcades that had
the same technology going on with moving pictures rather than still frames.

As a whole though the Domesday content was a bit like Encarta and other
multimedia CDs that came out when CD-ROM was a thing. Much like Encarta et
al., one felt slightly disappointed at the lack of depth to the
knowledge/information provided, thank goodness Wikipedia took off.

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lordelph
I remember getting involved in this when I was at school. It was part of the
inspiration behind [http://www.geograph.org.uk/](http://www.geograph.org.uk/)
where we set up a free archive of geographical-themed pictures of the UK.

Back in around 2005 I contacted the original project leader to see if we could
somehow help with the preservation, but at that time it was thought sorting
through the copyright issues would make it impossible. I was happy to see it
was eventually released online!

Long term archival was a concern for Geograph - aside from adopting a cc-by-sa
licence on image submissions, we also worked with the National Archives to
ensure a digital copy of the image archive is preserved.

The Domesday project occupies what seems now - the briefest window of
opportunity - to create something that would become obsolescent so quickly!
But I think its true value lies in acting as a warning to others...

~~~
teh_klev
> I remember getting involved in this when I was at school.

Same here. It was my BBC micro we used to enter the data for our village
(Blackford). I never ever saw the end result.

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benoliver999
They have a web version made in 2011, where you can compare the 80s pictures
with 2011 pictures (looking at some places I know, they have already changed a
lot since then, perhaps we need a 2016 version!).

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday)

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ascorbic
It's pretty shameful that so little effort was apparently put into preserving
these. Why bother doing this if they're going to just put them on a disk and
let them rot for 30 years. As data become more sophisticated it seems to be
harder and harder to archive them in formats that aren't obsolete within a few
years. I can go to The National Archives and look at a document that's nearly
1000 years old (or visit [http://opendomesday.org/](http://opendomesday.org/)
), but the "new" version is unreadable less than 30 years later. What can be
done about this? I'm assuming people must be investigating future-proof
archival formats.

~~~
rwmj
There were a lot of technical stumbling blocks to getting the data out, but
the main problem was non-technical: Every child and adult who contributed has
copyright on their works, and there are no records nor any copyright
assignment.

The main benefit of this project was in providing many valuable lessons in how
badly things can go wrong :-(

~~~
ascorbic
And it would have been such as easy problem to solve if someone had thought of
it at the time. Plenty of open source projects have had to relearn this the
hard way too. You need to insist on copyright assignment!

~~~
rwmj
You need to insist that contributions are _licensed_ under some open source
license, which is different from copyright assignment. You may or may not do
copyright assignment as well, but many projects do not since it gives the
assignee powers to relicense the work including taking it proprietary.

Then there are "moral rights" which complicate things in some countries.

~~~
ascorbic
There aren't as far as I'm aware any open source licences that would allow the
copyright holders to take existing work proprietary. Once it's released it
can't be revoked. They'd only be able to do that to future work.

~~~
vidarh
Yes and no. They can not take away rights granted to existing licensees. But
the copyright holder can reissue the same work under whatever license they
wish, without having to modify anything.

What the comment you replied to point out is that if I release something under
the GPL and then assign copyright to you, you can legally decide to relicense
that code under a proprietary license so that the people buying it from me
don't have to abide by the GPL.

If I don't assign copyright, on the other hand, any such third parties would
need my permission too.

~~~
defiblep
Act of Parliament might do it. They did it for Peter Pan, after all.

I wonder if it would stand a chance as a private members bill....

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tragomaskhalos
I was a young graduate at Logica when this had just been completed, and sat
near a guy who was maintaining it. In what was then a largely "VT-100 world"
it was pretty cool.

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codeulike
Really interesting, seems like copyright is the main problem. No-one had
thought about that then, or the possibility of making the whole thing
universally accessible on the internet rather than sitting it in an archive.

~~~
sgt101
Making it accessible on the Internet may not preserve something. Just because
people can download something doesn't mean it will persist.

