1086 Domesday Book Outlives 1986 Electronic Rival 419
mccalli writes :"Thought people might find this amusing. In 1986, the UK compiled an electronic domesday book. They used BBC Master computers to do it, and the result was put on laserdisc. I actually used this project whilst at school. This article states that nothing can now read these merely 15-year old discs. The original, written approx. 1086, is still doing fine thank you very much." Sounds like a good candidate for Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project. (Speaking of Sterling, the "graying cyberpunk" has an interesting article in the Austin Chronicle on the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference called "Information Wants to be Worthless" -- thanks to reader ag3n7.) Update: 03/03 19:38 GMT by T : That's "domesday" not "doomsday."
Does anybody actually care? (Score:3, Insightful)
Media devices not information (Score:5, Insightful)
I can still access WordPerfect files from an old home computer from 1987. That computer still has a floppy drive which I can write files to. It still has the capability of connecting a null modem up to it for file transfer. Granted, that's not the easiest thing to do, but it's still accessible.
There HAVE to be some laserdisc readers someplace in the UK that can read this. The point they're probably making is 'be wary of putting too much faith in technology'. That's a good attitude to have, but simply putting a bit more thought into keeping the data available in multiple formats would help ensure no loss of access. Hell, this was a multimillion pound project - they couldn't burn any of this to conventional CDs too? Yes, you couldn't run out to Dixon's or BestBuy and get a CD burner for $100 like today, but I'd have thought a bit more technology was available to a multimillion pound project.
"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years. "
Yes, the desktops might, but the data won't. Put the data in normal, documented data formats, and put them on regular drives, CDs, ZIP disks, DVD, whatever. Don't put all your digital eggs in one basket, should be the lesson. OR, simply have a technology upgrade plan in place for data that is important enough to outlive the media on which it is contained. Data that was worth millions of pounds at one time should merit a stipend of a few thousand pounds a year to keep it accessible.
How did "Voyager" do it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Voyager (and Pioneer, if I remember rightly) made use of etched metal plates. None of this biodegradeable paper stuff, or indeed any other messaging mechanism that needs some middle translation layer between medium and understanding, beyond of course the natural interpretive layer we assume the eventual reader will have - the same way we can view a painting or listen to a song without understanding the language or thought flow of the originator.
Why the obsession with "new media"? The content on the internet will not remain in its current form forever, nor will CDs, DVDs, Laserdisks, 8-channel cartridges, Compact Cassettes, Vinyl LPs, etc. They're great, perfect for the here and now - but if we want to leave something for posterity, better Keep It Simple, Sirs.
Original article somewhat contentious (Score:3, Insightful)
From that article:
Betamax video players, 8in and 5in computer disks, and eight-track music cartridges have all become redundant, making it impossible to access records stored on them. Data stored on the 3in disks used in the pioneering Amstrad word-processor is now equally inaccessible.
Needless to say, the term redundant simply means that using standard equipment you'd have problems reading this data. But specialist media recovery firms maintain old machines and there are several that will convert your old 3-inch Amstrad disks or that Betamax wedding recording, for a fee.
The Domesday 1986 disks are undoubtedly difficult to access without specialist equipment, and that's the real problem--eventually any nascent technology will become obsolete and data will be lost. Eventually it will no longer be economic for data recovery companies to maintain their obsolete machines.
Paul Wheatley: "That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
If they have any sense they'll store most of it on fiche and store that in good conditions.
Does anyone else see the irony in this? (Score:2, Insightful)
"We have got a couple of rather scratchy pairs of discs and we are confident we will eventually be able to read all their images, maps and text," he said.
"Unfortunately, we don't know what we will do after that. We could store the data on desktop computers - but they are likely to become redundant in a few years.
"That means we have to find a way to emulate this data, in other words to turn into a form that can be used no matter what is the computer format of the future. That is the real goal of this project."
How about printing it on paper? Amazingly, it seems that the best way to 'emulate' the data over the past many centuries is to use a physical medium that requires no electricity, no magnetic readers, no lasers, no pools of mercury - only decent eyesight and some light. Hell, it's even portable!
If they complain that they can't fit it all on paper because there's too much data, then they should use very small print and include a magnifying glass like my grandmother's old unabridged dictionaries. It was still possible to read them without the magnifying glass if you got your eyes really close to the paper and squinted a little.
And if they complain that printing all the data on paper is too expensive, they should keep in mind how much money (2.5M) was wasted on the previous project. Better to spend more now and have it last a bit longer than 15 years.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Information vs POPULAR information (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it. Pick a very popular recent source of art.. say, the Beatles. How many formats is their work stored in? In how many languages? Really, this is a good argument for Peer-to-Peer media sharing systems. It takes media that society considers important and replicates and archives it all over the world..
Much how popular folk songs have been passed from generation to generation via spoken or sung words, current media is being passed around the globe and stored on everything from hardcopy to harddrives to optical media.
The only information we have to worry about losing is that which is forgotten by the masses.. for it is in danger of not being replicated and passed around.
Unless you don't use the Roman Alphabet... (Score:1, Insightful)
And am I the only person fed up of getting apostrophes converted to little boxes when put through various emailers? I can honestly say than I believe ASCII is a legacy format. 8 bits just simply dain't cut it no more.
tlhf
xxx
And anyway, ASCII is implicity WYSIWYG. Or did it just feel nice cussing a buzzword?
Re:Does anybody actually care? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's probably true in this case, but with more and more "cultural works" being stored on digital media, I suspect case like this one will become more frequent in the future.
The thing that should make you really worried, though, is that simply transferring the stuff to new media might not even be possible.
Have you copied your VHS tapes to DVD yet? Oh, wait, you can't -- it's Macrovision protected and Macrovision filters are illegal. (This is already the case thanks to the DMCA.)
Will you copy your audio CDs to audio DVDs? Oh, wait, you can't read them in a computer, a computer that could copy them will be illegal by the time CDs are outdated (thanks to the SSSCA).
Yes, sure, all of the data will still be available in some central location at the publisher. But what if Disney forgets about some movie, just like someone forget about this laserdisc? How many content has already been lost thanks to online news services going out of business or corrupting their database or whatever, simply because none of their readers stored the content on his hard disk?
I assume that a large amount of online content has already been lost. Maybe [put some failed .com here] published a great article two years ago, which is now not available on the web any more, but someone still has a copy of it. Unfortunately that someone cannot legally publish it, thanks to copyright legislation. Yes, it can be published in about 90 years, but will that someone still live then? Will he have copied the data to his new computer whenever he got one? Will it even have beem possible for him to copy the data, or will an SSSCA-like computer have prevented that?
Re:Unless you don't use the Roman Alphabet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, then you design some standard way to represent scientific symbols and equations with ASCII phrases. Given the wide use of TeX among scientists and mathemeticians, I would say this is a solved problem.
However, I agree with your point about foreign languages.
obsolete desktops. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it really such a difficult project to simply upgrade your digital storage as time goes on? Even though people might see this as a waste of time, consider your savings in storage. Converting old media, especially old magnetic tapes (think nasa) to newer, longer lasting, and SMALLER media formats, just makes sense. Nasa isnt' going to suddenly quit collecting data, its going to continue. The savings in physical storage space alone would make it worth the effort. The fact that this information will then continue to be accessible for generations to come is just a benifitial side effect.
-Restil
Re:Information vs POPULAR information (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. And as long as the Beatle's music is considered important enough by enough people (which is probably at least a few centuries, maybe longer -- "Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and the Beatles" isn't a joke) it will continue to be transfered to whatever the storage media of the time are. That's the point that I think everyone crying "put it on paper" is missing: Of course electronic media are perishable, and of course whatever snazzy new high-capacity storage medium you're using right now will probably be obsolete in a decade, but as long as you can and do transfer from one medium to another, preferably backing up in multiple locations on multiple types of media, your data is more likely by far to survive for the ages than a single paper copy somewhere would be. That such effectively infinite copying and storage is possible is one of the wonders of the electronic age -- we just have to be smart enough to take advantage of it properly.
Re:Media devices not information (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonetheless, NOTHING we've developed beats good 'ole paper for longterm storage and useability. It is an absolute certainty that in 50 years, 100 years, all your CDs, DVDs, floppies, zip disks, etc, etc, will be useless and any data stored thereon will be unreachable. Not so with books (REAL books, of course, not bogus e-books). Books 2000 years old are still accessible and readable.
The only way to protect information for the long haul is some form of printed format for the REALLY important stuff. Beyond that, the best you can do is faithfully keep copying data/information from a dying "standard" to the latest, greatest new "standard" which will be OK for a decade or so, then transfer again ad infinitum.
Obviously, for some things, the high-tech solution is useful and neato but for anything long-term (we're talking many decades to centuries to millenia) high-tech is not the most efficient or safest way to go.
Dumb. (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone ever heard of a catweasel board? Even GCR encoded floppies, all the way back to the 8 inchers are readable. Truly, with a little effort, I don't see the problem they are having. Pull the stuff off these discs, and archive it on cd or a big RAID array somewhere. Hell, people would mirror it too, as far as that goes. And as for a file format that won't be obselete? I'd go with html myself, though pdf wouldn't be too awful. Sure, these might be old and crusty in 10 years, but we'll never suffer from a way to read them. Someone will always write new software for these formats, and only that if for some reason the old software itself won't compile. This is truly a hardware issue, and not too bad of one at that.
Of course, the Luddites have to have something to complain about, might as well be this.
Re:Media devices not information (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh yeah, with regards to my "...the best you can do is faithfully keep copying data/information from a dying "standard" to the latest, greatest new "standard" which will be OK for a decade or so, then transfer again ad infinitum" statement, this only holds safe and longterm barring any sort of civilization-trashing catastrophy. All the dilligent saving of information from CD to DVD to crystal to whatever comes later will be for squat when something happens that reduces technical society to something simpler. All that nice stored data becomes useless trash whereas an ancient book remains accessible.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
We'd better care (Score:4, Insightful)
Take the case of the Aloutte satellite that was launched in 1967.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/8434/essay
It collected tons of information about the ionosphere and stored that information on now obsolette tape. At the time, the information was processed and condensed and placed in an archive.
There are tonnes and tonnes of these tapes. Twenty years later, historical information on the o-zone layer became important. Since the original Aloutte researchers weren't looking for o-zone data, they never bothered to analyze that data. The only way to do that is to go to the original tapes.
The problem is, only a few machines can read these tapes and since the tape readers are *extremely* slow by todays standards, it will take years to transfer all that information to CD. What's worse is that some of the tapes are already worn out, so a good deal of information will be lost.
Just imagine what would have happened if the ancient greeks were so advanced that they stored all their information on CDs. We'd never get out of the dark ages, because people lost interest in preserving knowledge while Rome was crumbling.
All of Aristotle, Euclid, and other scientist's work would be on CDs that no-one knew how to read. No-one would even know what the CDs were for. They'd get as much respect as AOL CD, being used as frisbees, placemats, decorations, or just thrown in the trash.
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2, Insightful)
The Mayan calander is _more_ advanced than the calander we use. The Egyptians build structures that we would struggle to build right now. Atlantis had flying machines, according to the legends. So I gave you at least 3 examples of civilizations that are _more_ advanced than we are now.
It's funny, we have cars, but how many people can build their own car? 1 in 10,000? We have TV's but how many people can build their own TV? 1 in 100,000? How many people can build their own plane? 1 in 1,000,000? How many can build their own jet plane? 1 in 10,000,000? Face it, we are barbarians, we use things, but they might as well be magic to us. If civilization breaks down, it will go down fast and stay down for a long time. And very few traces of our existing civilization will remain.
By what standard are you saying we are more advanced? Most people in the world live exactly the same as their ancestors live. They might occassionaly see the jet trails of their overlords in the sky every now and again, but have no hope of ever flying in one themself. They use animals to power their farm implements. Maybe 5% of the people in the world own a car and live like most americans do. But even now 20% of americans live in abject poverty. You just need to get out more and open your eyes. It's fun to raise 3 kids on minimum wage.
Building cool machines is not the only definition of civilation, especially when 95% of humans never get to use those machines. And I've talked to a lot of people in chat who seem to only be able to say, "Any hot babes wanna give me a blow job?" Yeah, that's the reason we have the internet, so assholes can attempt to get laid. Try to engage them in a conversation about Platos' republic will more than likely result in a "Platos who?"
I think that you are ignorant if you believe that the education that a greek got wasn't as good or better than the college education that we get from a State University now. Remember, that some of these people were taught in person by Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato. These three people are the foundation of modern Western thought. More than likely, only an echo of their knowlege was passed down to us. I only recall a couple of good college professors out of the dozens that I've had and none of them were as good as these people were.
>> Likewise, using just deductive logic and a few working examples most anything can be reverse engineered. Foreiogn knock-off artists can reproduce just about any thing electronic. Hell, the entire GNU project is based around the idea. Granted we have pretty good idea of the realm of which we are working.
What working example? In 10,000 years there will be no working examples of DVD players. I doubt the DVD's will still be good in 10,000 years, because of the plastic falling apart, but I know for a fact that all the DVD players will be gone in 100 years.
>> I have confidence that humans (or successors) in 10,000 years will be able to successfuly extract digital information from our current technology - just as we are able to decode data from civilizations thousands of years ago.
But you just said that there are languages that we _can't_ translate, and I agree with you. Without the rosseta stone we would not have been able to translate Egyptian either. So _no_, they won't be able to decode everything, unless they can find a rosetta stone too.
As far as you saying that Egyptian is different between artists, that's pure crap. It isn't even a pure ideograph system, because some of the symbols are phonetic.
Here is the link for knowing that Egyption had phonetic symbols, also how they used the rosetta stone to translate Egyption to modern languages.
http://www.chesco.com/~cslice/aurora/rosetta/ro
Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:1, Insightful)
We *could* build the pyramids. It'd be difficult using the techniques that the Egyptians did, but if Egypt really wanted to knock off another pyramid and was willing to put up the money, they could do it. Yes, it would be expensive, but it was expensive back then, too.
Atlantis is bullshit.
Your complaint that everyone doesn't know how to build a car or a TV or a plane is bogus. In an "advanced civilization", specialization is inevitable. There's too much knowledge for each person to master all of it. So I become a computer programmer...but I cannot grow crops to feed myself. That's fine -- I rely on the rest of society. At one point, the single-celled organisms that make up our bodies didn't depend on each other to live, either. Wouldn't you call a human more advanced than the blue-green algae that they descended from?
You say that 5% of the people in the world own a car and live like most Americans. So? He didn't say that everyone in the world was part of an advanced cilivization. You can probably find a few remote tribes that have very little contact with the outside world. Doesn't say anything about first world civilizations.
You say that "20% of Americans live in abject poverty". Hah. Perhaps below the poverty line. But that is a joke, a sheer joke, compared to what civilizations in the past underwent, and in some ways their lives are better than a fifteen century king. It's almost impossible to starve to death in the US, regardless of what happens. It's fairly easy to purchase an *enormous* variety of food, even if you don't have tons of money. You can get vegtables in the *winter*! We have soft, machine made cloth that's much nicer than hand-knitted wool. We have lots of clothes compared to the one, *maybe* two outfits that a fifteenth-century English pesant would have. Most Americans, if they live in a cold environemtn, have access to a heated building. Most Americans have running water and sewage, something that you could only dream of in the fourteenth century. If you can afford an old TV (not cable), which most people can manage to scrounge up from somewhere, you have 24-hour entertainment. With a radio, you have a wide selection of 24-hour music playing for you. Even if you don't own a car, in most places public transportation carries you quickly and in comfort -- far better than even an aristocrat's bumpy carrige did once. Our sanitary and health situation is much better, and we are free of scurvy, smallpox, plague, and the like. You have the ability to travel fairly easily -- even someone with very little money can save up and get the gas money to travel great distances -- far more than an English peasant might hope to travel in their lifetime.
You're upset that you can talk about blowjobs but not the Republic online. Again, hah! No past civilization that I know of of any reasonable size has had the degree of education that we do in the US. Yes, there's still highbrow material that people won't be able to converse about...but who do you expect to talk to about the Republic in ancient times? The overwhelming majority of people in fifteenth century England (okay, so I like using this as an example, but I don't know about France or anything else as well) were illiterate.
You claim that a Greek is as good or better educated than a state university education. Very, very few people were actually taught by Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. In the case of Plato and Socrates, it was primarily wealthy young men. If you read the Republic that you so happily wave around, you'll notice that Aristotle favored a very strong form of aristocracy -- few, very few people were educated and of the philosopher-king ruling class. I don't know about the makeup of the students in the Academy, but I suspect it wasn't much different than those wealthy young men that hung out with Plato way back when.
"I only recall a couple of good college professors out of the dozens that I've had and none of them were as good as these people were"
Well, given that you're reading a compiled summary that's been translated and often interpreted for both Plato and Aristotle, it's kind of hard to attribute what you're reading to their skills alone.
I agree that DVD players are not likely to be around in 100 years.
Finally, I think that the Rosetta Stone isn't that relevant. Finding a modern reencoding of something in an ancient format shouldn't be hard, even if it's just Hitler's speech at the Olympic Games (stealing a page from Contact). The problem is even knowing what something is -- video or audio?
Plus, language is relatively simple and has quite a patterns compared to an encrypted stream that runs through many different circuits before popping out the other end.
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:4, Insightful)
However, said team had some idea of the purpose behind that shiny silver disk, and some idea of what the plaintext should look like.
Consider 12000 CE.
You're an archaeologist, and you find a shiny silvery disk approximately 10 flurburbs in diameter. What is it for? It has some markings on one side that your specialist in dead languages tells you says, "Porky's 2: The Next Day". The other side apparently functions as a diffraction grating.
Now what?
Re:Does anybody actually care? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, that's astonishingly short-sighted and narrow-minded. There are a lot of important things whose importance was not realized at the time, or for some time afterwards. The most obvious example that springs immediately to mind is Gregor Mendel's experimental work, upon which our entire understanding of genetics was originally based, and which went unpublished and ignored for years.
Unlike technical manuals, the value of other forms of information is not necessarily proportional to how recently they've been produced. Even in the hard sciences, studies designed to support theories subsequently disproven can be valuable sources of experimental data further down the road. Certainly something like a census could be immensely valuable to historians -- and only become more so the older it gets.
Moreover, a lot of valuable data is in danger of being lost not because it isn't worth anything or because no one notices it or wants to preserve it, but because the expense of transferring the data to new media (from, perhaps, acidified paper, microfilm, old digital media, or some other perishable product) is too high.
The key lesson here -- which I wish the easily-swayed-by-gee-whiz-technology crowd would clue into -- is that media companies think in terms of next quarter, not in terms of anything as vague and unprofitable as posterity. Preserving important information on digital media is little different from burning books. If you want permanence, you need good paper -- a centuries-old technology that the so-called digital revolution has absolutely nothing on in terms of permanence.