DOMESDAY86
Credit: www.domesday86.com
OUR EXPERT
Matt Holder has worked in IT support for over a decade and always tries to utilise Linux alongside the other installed systems.
The Domesday Book is an incredible piece of British history, compiled between 1085 and T 1086 as a record of the Great Survey ordered by King William I. It covered land usage and money owed to the king. Much of England and parts of Wales were surveyed. The book survives today and is stored at the National Archives at Kew Gardens.
What does this have to do with us computer lovers? Well, during the ’80s, the BBC launched a project to mark the 900th anniversary of the book, because part of the BBC’s remit is not only to broadcast TV programmes, but also to educate viewers. The project aimed to be a survey of sorts about the whole of the United Kingdom, with much of the information produced by school children.
The BBC, Acorn, Phillips and Logica worked together on the project because some serious (for the time) hardware and data storage was needed.
Dredging his memory, this writer still remembers a day in year five of primary school when a trolley was wheeled into the classroom. On this trolley was a BBC Master AIV, a monitor, which was pretty much the shape of a perfect cube, a LaserDisc player and a trackerball. The trackerball was used to navigate around the software’s interface, which seemed positively space-age at the time. From the front of the classroom, Mr L announced that the day’s lesson would encompass a demonstration of the Domesday software, presumably loaned by the local council. A giant silver-coloured disc was then taken from its protective case and loaded into the player.
Laser trailblazer
LaserDiscs were 12 inches in diameter and stored analogue video and digital or analogue sound. Depending on the method used, disks could hold between 30 and 36 minutes, or between 60 and
