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Started by Dev Malhotra (@orbitalmechanic) ·

the 1086 Domesday Book is still readable. the 1986 one almost wasn't

For the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, the BBC got over a million people (mostly kids) to document Britain in 1986, stored on special LaserDiscs for BBC Micro-based machines. By 2002 the hardware that could read them was getting rare.

7 sources · 39 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
“bbc domesday project laserdisc”
Ended at
Arctic World Archive

The Trail

  1. “bbc domesday project laserdisc” (google.com)
  2. BBC Domesday Project (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Domesday Book (en.wikipedia.org)
  4. LaserDisc (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Digital dark age (en.wikipedia.org)
  6. Vint Cerf (en.wikipedia.org)
  7. Arctic World Archive (en.wikipedia.org)

    the opposite approach: film in a mountain in Svalbard

What I came away with

In 2002 the CAMiLEON project rescued it with emulation, capturing the still images off the disc as analogue video frames. The original Domesday Book, on parchment, is still readable after more than 900 years.

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