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."
Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder would happen to a newspaper editor that let one blatant error slide each day?
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:3, Informative)
You don't read the paper often, do you? Hell, both AP and Reuters kept referring to the anthrax virus - something that I have never heard of despite many years of microbiology. The anthrax bacteria, yes... but a virus? Wow.
--
Evan
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:2)
That is more a case of unfamiliarity with the subject. You would think that when you are dealing with a specific news area, the people posting the articles should have the sense to know what is what, or at least the ability to research it.
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:2)
Okay, and...
You would think that when you are dealing with a specific news area, the people posting the articles should have the sense to know what is what, or at least the ability to research it.
So in other words, this instance was a case of unfamiliarity with the subject.
--
Evan
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't that Microsoft's slogan? I smell some trademark infringement here...
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:5, Informative)
The humor of the title probably wasn't appreciated by many of the people chronicled in it, as the study was carried out on the orders of William I, who had just conquered them. It was, in many ways, an inventory of what he had just gained by beating the Saxons and taking their lands.
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:4, Informative)
Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English [amazon.com] glosses 'dom' as 'judgment' and 'dæg' as 'day' ('dæg' being just the pre-invasion West Saxon spelling of 'day'). '-es' in 'domes' is just the genetive singular inflection for masculine nouns. So "Judgment's Day" is the closest you'll get. 'Domdæg' is actually the original (10th century West Saxon) Old English term, literally translating as "judgment day", in the Mitchell and Robinson text.
A caveat: Because the word 'Domesday' was written post-invasion, it's technically Middle English, but comes directly on the heals of the Old English period and so has more to do with King Ælfred's language than Chaucer's.
Re:Doomsday? DOMESDAY (Score:3, Informative)
It's just an archaic spelling of the same word, though I guess it's a fair point that some non-British readers may not have heard of the Domesday Book. The name was a deliberate allusion to the census as something akin to the final judgement that was supposed to follow the second coming of the messiah.
I took part in this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I took part in this. (Score:2, Interesting)
First broadcast October 1958, still going, 25-odd presenters since then. Famous over here for:
a) The baby elephant dumping on (live) camera
b) The bomb-proof but cute Valerie Singleton (if you are of a certain age, otherwise the current Konnie Huq looks like a worthy replacement)
c) 'Here's one I made earlier' - phrase for live TV when demoing recipe, or when things go hopelessly wrong
d) John Noakes doing ballet
e) 'Sticky tape' and 'sticky backed plastic' - essential ingredients of DIY presents for kids to make, but trade names such as Scotch tape and Fablon were verboten on BBC
f) Raising significant $$ for various disaster zones from the Biafran war onwards - not bad from collecting junk (stamps, foil...)
Oh, and many other things no doubt. Good stuff, anybody complaining about worthiness etc. should remember that it's always been accompanied by the likes of Scooby Doo in the schedules.
Should have used (Score:3, Interesting)
Stable media and popular references (Score:2)
Any other media? Punch cards? What's the encoding? Paper tape same thing. Clay tablets? Storage and retrieval are hell. Printed? Storage and security are difficult and expensive, just ask the folks at the old library in Alaxandria.
There ARE mediums that can be assumed to be reasonably long-lived. Text on gold foil is pretty good, there are lots of other more exotic but similar-in-concept technologies. Of course one pertinant question is if anyone *cares*. If it was just realized that the modern Domesday Book was unreadable clearly it wasn't a standard reference. Yes it might be a loss to future historians but I doubt there's much in it that isn't replacable from any of the numerous more popular references.
Re:Stable media and popular references (Score:2)
Re:Stable media and popular references (Score:2)
Yes, it is extremely hard. It is also extremely brittle, which makes it a bad choice as it takes so much force to make a mark in a tablet of it, it'll probably break.
Does anybody actually care? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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.
Questions (Score:3, Interesting)
How "extremely slow by todays standards" are human beings reading paper? My guess would be hundreds of times slower than the most obsolete tape reader.
Re:Does anybody actually care? (Score:2)
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.) Yes I have and the DCMA can't force me to use Macrovision on content that I own. (My home movies, my videography from college...) and anyone that was big into VHS has a macrovision scrubber which made the resulting video even better to watch on that big screen projector... so that isn't an issue either. What IS an issue is that noone wants to take the time and effort to convert their VHS copy of "sneakers" they just buy the DVD for $9.95 at Target. Yes anything that I want to keep has been Mpeg2 encoded. Granted most of it is still on DLT tapes around here (that which I only had Vhs copies of left. I havent converted anything that is on Betacam SP as this will be a standard for another 10 years at least)
Laws dont keep you from backing up anything or converting from a old technology to new.. It keeps you from making copies of things you dont own. (ownership of IP is still a stupid concept that only corperations can make sense of..)
AS for that laserdisc... I highly doubt that it is unreadable.. Hell I still have a n old EBCDIC 9track tape drive WITH a ISA card that will talk to it. and my Pioneer Laserdisc player has a data-out port. (plus if it displays it can be decoded.. I retrieved data off of a backup-VHS tape that was made in 1984 with that abortion that radio-shack sold to backup a computer to a VHS VCR.)
The points you make are assuming that everyone wants to obey the law. Driving on any highway in america will answer that question easily.. Americans ignore any and all laws that they dont believe in or that inconvience them. (speed limits are laws.. yet all of you break that law daily.)
Yes it's "against the law" but that means nothing to normal people anymore.
Re:Does anybody actually care? (Score:2)
I hope something is done about this, but I certainly don't have the power or the resources to influence the right people.
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.
WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly why Don Knuth developed TeX. He was concerned about the life expectancy of documents such as this.
His idea was to write your documents in plain text (the lowest common denominator) and use a processor to convert them to whatever format you need 'today': postscript, html, or whatever.
It may not be as sexy as WYSIWYG, but it will *always* work.
Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII (Score:2)
The problem here is not only the format, but the storage medium as well. My Ph.D. thesis has been stored in wonderful TeX format on those 5-inch floppy disks. They are unreadable now. Fortunately, I still have the printed original, that can be photocopied the old way.
Dead trees rule!
Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII (Score:3, Funny)
"We'll need to find a storage medium that can be decoded by the one engine that will not fade for a long time; The Human Brain.
Can you imagine spell-checking your document only for the computer to stop at a word and bring up a box saying, "Oh I know this one... it's on the tip of my tongue... no, don't tell me..."
Seriously though, as long as the media doesn't deteriorate we can always reverse-engineer to get the data back if it's really important.
Phillip.
Re:WYSIWYG vs Plain ASCII - BeOS style (Score:2, Interesting)
The document is just plain text, but all of the formatting is stored as metadata.
The upshot, is that unlike most word processing documents, they are clearly readable with simple text editors. Even if you edit the document in a simple text editor, the formatting will remain coherent the next time the document is viewed in a word processor.
Of course this isn't as robust as TeX or such, because it relies on the metadata storing capabilities of the filesystem, and you may be limiting yourself to the BeFS (though there is no reason why NTFS or any filesystem like perhaps XFS or ReiserFS when taking advantage of Linux's VFS couldn't have similar functionality.) Even then , if you were to copy the document to another less enabled filesystem, you would only lose advanced formatting information. The body of text would still be fully useable.
-castlan
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.
Re:Unless you don't use the Roman Alphabet... (Score:3)
Then try UTF-8, which is also plain-text, and shows no signs of being obsoleted. (The Unicode Consortium is honestly trying for a standard to last a thousand years, or at least as long as we use digital computers.)
Also, what about text data which is unable to be displayed in ASCII such as scientific equations or charts?
You may not be able to display them, but you can store them in ASCII. For long term data storage, it's more important that they be recreatable with a little work than they be instantly displayable.
And am I the only person fed up of getting apostrophes converted to little boxes when put through various emailers?
Then stop using a proprietary encoding. If you used an encoding that was an open standard, like ASCII or Latin 1, then it would get through without problem. If you use a Windows codepage, well, then of course other people will have problems displaying it correctly. When you use a media proprietary to one company, like Betamax or DivX or CP1252, then you will have problems working with everyone else.
SGML, HTML, XML only define grammar (Score:2)
SGML and derivatives only define grammar rules. A document is then either valid or invalid according to the rules of grammar.
The most obvious examples a hrefs:
<a href='foo.html'>link</a>
SGML can only determine that the above statement is valid. There is no way in SGML to say that this should have the effect of creating an underlined word that sends info to your browser when clicked on.
It's the same with some sort of <font size=14pt> statment. SGML can only say that this is valid. Although you and I can tell what this means, it doesn't mean anything in SGML as far as formatting documents.
TeX data actually defines specifically how it should be rendered.
But the app spec defines the behavior (Score:2)
There is no way in SGML [or XML] to say that [a particular markup] should have the effect of creating an underlined word that sends info to your browser when clicked on.
However, a Plain Old Ascii Text(tm) format document can describe the behavior of a particular application of SGML or XML. An example of such a document is the W3C HTML 4.01 spec.
TeX data actually defines specifically how it should be rendered.
So does XHTML + CSS.
This is exactly what I was talking about.. (Score:2, Interesting)
With more and more of our culture being created and stored exclusively on digital media, there is a real danger that future generations may have little, or even nothing, to tell them what our lives were like, because everything we've left behind is inaccessible.
(BTW, this particular work is not the "Doomsday" book, it's the "Domesday Book," a comprehensive survey and ledger of the lands and holdings of King William in the 11th century.)
DennyK
Re:This is exactly what I was talking about.. (Score:3, Funny)
Quite right. I submitted the story, and it looks my typing habits have been corrupted by too many iD games....
Cheers,
Ian
Re:This is exactly what I was talking about.. (Score:2)
Doomsday or Domesday (Score:3, Interesting)
Not as far as I know. William I was an extremely brutal invader, and after the Sack of Yorkshire in the early 1080s (1082?) his Doomsday book assed the value of Yorkshire to be only 5 shillings - 4 ounces of silver in other words. The invasion of England was ultimately a business venture for the feudal Normansand he needed to know just how much money he could extract from his new estate, as subdivided by his barons etc. Doomsday it was. Now the entire Anglo-Saxon land ownship sysytem was overthrown, people were precisely put into catagories such as villain (i.e. land-owning peasent), tenent (renting land), serf (land-tied part-slave, part renter), and slave. The who period was a bloody disaster for the English, basically to feed the Norman-French war machine. That was why the book was called the Doomsday book as I understood it. I think Domesday is just an archaic spelling meaning the same thing.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Media devices not information (Score:2)
If so, perhaps you should commit it to paper after all.
Re:Media devices not information (Score:2)
Long Now Project (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the original goal of the doomsday project was to allow every school in the UK to have a copy. So there should be a BBC Master hooked up to a laserdisc player in almost every school ?
Re:Long Now Project (Score:2)
BBC Masters? The state schools in the UK are so poor they can only afford Acorn Electrons or RM Nimbus 186's.
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.
Re:How did "Voyager" do it? (Score:2)
They're just videodisks (Score:2, Informative)
The Domesday Disc (note spelling) was a double-sided videodisk that ran into a modified videodisk drive attached to a likewise modified BBC Master, a rather nice 6502-based microcomputer. The Master's video output went through the videodisk player. What happened was the client software told the player to display a particular frame, and the Master would overlay graphics on top of it. There was also a mechanism for reading raw data from the audio portion of the videodisk. It was really quite simple (but horribly expensive).
I would have thought that a conventional computer Laserdisk player would be able to get all the data off.
A few discs were made for the system, but the Domesday Disc was the only one that was mass produced. If you're interested, there's lots of information on the Domesday Project [atsf.co.uk] page.
What is this? (Score:5, Informative)
www.domesdaybook.co.uk [domesdaybook.co.uk]
Sorry, I posted this once already and typoed the link.
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.
This is what bothers me about DVD copy protection (Score:3)
I'm hoping that once we move on to yet another larger format that there are some countries free enough that I can download a program that will allow me to move the DVDs to the new format.
Oxidization also bothers me.
More to the Point (Score:2)
With the length of copyright terms, the illegality of copying a protected DVD (or even discussing the methods used to do so, according to the MPAA) and the shelf life of the media, the industry can make their money on their works and guarantee that they never live to see the light of public domain. Neither film nor DVD will survive long enough.
On the other hand, in 100 years, no one will remember who Britney Spears was, either, so I guess it's not all bad.
Source article (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdotting (Score:2)
Unfortunately, due to server difficulties The Domesday Book Online has been unavailable for a short time. We apologise to all those who have tried but been unable to get to the site. The site as it was is now back online, but a new and much improved version will soon be unveiled so watch this space...
And now they are going to be slashdotted. Ironic.
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
Paper? Be careful... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with paper is that only highly specific types of paper are all that durable over many years. Most normal kinds of paper that you typically see have a high acid content, which causes them to yellow and then disintegrate with age. Your average paperback book will start to crumble in a few decades or so, most newspapers even earlier. I have quite a few paperbacks that are about 20 years old (which is when I started buying my own books), and they have definitely started to yellow and turn brittle even though they have been stored in a dry, clean, reasonably climate-controlled place (i.e. my living room).
Acid-free paper can also deteriorate over time, especially if handled a lot (since sweat from fingers also contains acids and bacteria) or just exposed to the air (which is also slightly acidic in normal circumstances, especially if the air is at all polluted), and also depending on the kind of inks used. Soy inks, which are increasingly popular with mass-printed media, may decay or fade over time (though they have not been in use long enough to know for sure); offset inks can also turn acidic if not properly mixed and/or discolor over time.
So it's not as simple as just "printing on paper". You need to use specially-produced acid-free (slightly alkaline) paper; use a non-acidic ink with a chemically stable pigment; and store it in climate-controlled conditions, where it can't be handled or even breathed upon.
Ironically, parchment and soot ink have proven remarkably stable over time. So long as parchment books were not stored in overly bad conditions (too damp or in polluted air), they held up for many hundreds of years with no trouble.
In a way, this story comes as no surprise to anyone who's interested in calligraphy and medieval history -- take a look at the books in museums, like the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Museum or the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin, and they look amazingly bright and fresh some 1300 years after they were made.
Those monks wanted to write for a very long posterity, and stumbled on just the way to do it -- sheepskins (vellum) and ink out of bone black.
If you're interested in medieval writing materials, check out these pages:
Ink Recipes [regia.org]
Handmade Paper -- Archival Paper [handpapermaking.org]
Medieval Manuscripts [swaen.com]
Cheers,
Ethelred [grantham.de]
Wow, this brings back memories (Score:5, Interesting)
The Domesday Book on laserdisk was pretty neat; you could look up pertinent details for your local area, and it formed the basis of a lot of good history projects. IIRC, it had some primitive hypertext facilities.
I'm absolutely positive that this could be resurrected if needs-be. Enough copies of this went out to schools that finding a readable laserdisk shouldn't be a problem, and there has to be a working reader somewhere. I seem to remember that the data wasn't in any particularly obscure format, so mounting it on a BBC Master and sending it to a different machine shouldn't be too difficult.
If needs be, one could probably export the whole thing and mount it via a hacked BeebEm.
What will future people find of us in 10,000 years (Score:3, Interesting)
We only build things to last 100 years at most anymore. And most things get torn down long before that. The only thing we make that lasts longer than that is our toxic waste.
Can you imagine how suprised a future archielogist will be when they dig into some radioactive waste that is still active in 10,000 years? Lethally suprised. *L* Maybe there will be legends of curses on people who dig in ancient sites? Kind of like the curse of the mummy.
There may have been civilizations before that were just as advanced as our own. When they collapsed they may have simply vanished with nary a trace in just a couple of thousand years. It isn't as hard as you think. A 1 mile wide asteroid hits the earth, dust obscures the sun for a few years so that all the plants die and the people fight and die for the few remaining scraps of food.
I often wonder if maybe the few real UFO's that are seen and the aliens that we hear about are visitors from space colonies that these previous civilizations managed to place on the moon or in the asteroid belt. If they aren't all the feverored imaginings of half crazy people.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2)
Minor nit, but one-time pads properly implemented are uncrackable.
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2)
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2)
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2)
Errr, no.
>>A team of programmers including a 15-yr old broke the DVD encryption within a few years - I am sure that humans 10k+ years from now will be able to replicate that same type of work!
No, they had one key that wasn't encrypted to begin with that let them decode the system. If you don't know the layout of the file system to know which groups of bits are the unencrypted key, you will never, never, never be able to decrypt the data. They also kind of knew what the output is going to look like, and already knew how to decode the compressed video and audio streams, something that will not be doable in 10,000 years.
>> Second, the Egyptian writings were in fact encrypted - ideogram languages are very effectively encypted. Essentially they many are encrypted using "one time pads" (where the "one time pads" are the language themselves. As you might know, one time pads when propertly implemented are very difficult to crack in a reasonable amount of time. This is why you will see entire ancient languages which we larely do not understand.
Ideograms are _not_ one time pads. One time pads change with each message. A language is consistantly used.
>> Name five. Or actually, name two.
1. Maya. Very advanced mathematics, their calander lasts 10,000 years without any corrections. We have to correct our calendar every 4 years, and again every 100, 400, and 1000 years. They vanished without a trace most likely because there was a drout and thier extensive irrigation systems failed. An irrigation system that we are only just now matched in scale here in the US.
2. Atlantis. All the myths about previous civilations have been rolled into this one fabled land.
3. Acient Egypt. We would have to struggle very hard to match the engineering needed to build the pyramids, and even with laser surveying we would struggle to be as precise as they were. Let alone moving the 100,000 ton blocks that make up a lot of their construction.
4. There are the huge deserted cities swallowed by the jungle to be found in Asia.
5. In the Americas there are the mound building indians of Ohio.
6. And the cliff dwellers of the South West.
7. The Romans had every luxury, including hot and cold running water, sewers, hot tubs and saunas. They even had huge automated mills that were ran with water power to process the grains every year. They also were building steam engines just before they failed. Their failure is also know as the dark ages. When empires fail they leave chaos and ignorance behind.
8. Ghenis Kahn's empire streached from the Pacific Ocean in China, to Poland and down to the meditranian in the middle east. Nothing is left to show that this empire existed, except in the history books. It was the largest empire to ever exist on the face of the earth. It could also field an army of 5 million men and keep them on a campaign for years.
9. Carthage lost against Rome and not a single thing remains of them except for a few footers of some buildings.
I can go on and on all day long. There are hundreds of advanced civilations that have come and gone, whose only existance lives in word of mouth or in copies of copies of copies of writings from word of mouth.
We know that there was an extensive trade network in prehistory, because cocain has been found in Egyption mumies and cocain is only available from South America.
The city of Troy was also thought to be a myth and never exist, but it turns out that it did exist. It was actually under a city that is now called a different name.
I named more than 5, do I get a prize?
Re: (Score:2)
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: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?
Keeping people away from Rx waste in 10000 years (Score:2)
WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D. [halcyon.com]
This goes through all of the technicalities of signposting things so that people in the future will stay away from them or be aware of dangers into the future.. even if they can't understand English.
There are a lot of diagrams there.. most of the ideas revolve around using imposing spikes.. or 'universal' pictures, such as that of someone dying.
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2)
They were, in a sense--the Coptic language had died before modern scholars started to read them.
Pepys deliberately encrypted his diary using a homemade shorthand, and wrote some of the sexual passages in a vulgar dialect of latin.
The current generation of DVD encryption is no challenge to a good mathematician.
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:4, Funny)
hehehe
Encrypted computer data will lead us into a new dark age of information if people are stupid and decide to archive books and artwork digitally and destroy the originals. Tablets and oil paintings are more effective to document history.
--Jeff
Re:What will future people find of us in 10,000 ye (Score:2)
Aren't laserdiscs analog? (Score:2)
Anyway, I still have a laserdisc player in my livingroom, so they aren't dead yet! hehe.
Re:Aren't laserdiscs analog? (Score:2)
OT [Re:Aren't laserdiscs analog?] (Score:2, Funny)
But it's the BBC, old boy, they'd be analogue
- Derwen
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.
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:Information vs POPULAR information (Score:2, Interesting)
do we realy want the future to think that porn was concidered important. gee, it's replicated in all formats all over the world
Well, it is considered important by a lot of people, and given how widespread it is, has definately made a major impact on our culture. Like it or not, that's a part of history and should be recorded as such.
15 years old and incomprehensible? (Score:2, Interesting)
Digital storage *is* perfectly viable. But digital storage 15 years ago and digital storage today would be like comparing accountancy before Arabic numerals and after.
Today reliability, speed and capacity is what, 1000 times greater? No more need for weird compression techniques -- plain text (or TeX) documents can be stored. Viciously *uncompressed* graphics, too.
With 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, surely we can task a few of 'em with keeping the media current.
(Also, to be pedantic: Optical media are disCs, magnetic media are disKs.)
Somewhat amusing... (Score:2)
All I want to know is... (Score:2)
Every project has its Boswell (Score:2, Informative)
Hmm (Score:2)
Somebody mod this up :) (Score:2)
Hmm, come to think of it, maybe the Rosetta stone was outlawed by the ancient Egyptians...
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
Books can't be Slashdotted! (Score:2, Funny)
From http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk [domesdaybook.co.uk]:
The original book even outlasted the online version! ;)
Digital Archives (Score:2, Informative)
Now make it all last a zillion or two years. Any digital media we have today (tape, cd, etc.) might last 20 years if you are lucky. Even if you built a special purpose computer to store it, the silicon chips themselves might last only 20 years before they break down. If you can find a media that lasts, then you have to guarantee that the format will be readable. This requires that you archive the software that reads the format and perhaps the OS that the software runs on.
A digital library also loses a lot as well. If we archive the Domesday Book and lose the original, we have lost any opportunity to learn about the paper and ink technology of the original copy.
There is a branch of Library and Information Sciences that studies these problems. There have also been a couple of ACM CACM issues devoted to some of this.
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.
The 1086 Domesday book is *not* "perfectly usable" (Score:2)
sed solves your problem (Score:2)
The article claims that the 1086 Book is still "perfectly usable". It is not. In order to understand it one has to know 1) Latin
In order to understand the source code to your precious Linux kernel one has to know 1) C
and 2) the odd medieval abbrevations common to Latin manuscripts in England at the time.
sed makes short work of those once the text has been ocr'd into a computer.
Both these skills are just as obsolete
Hardly. The Italian language is nothing more than the modern form of Latin. Any Italian speaker could be up to speed on Latin in a matter of weeks.
as BBC microcomputers.
The difference between knowledge of Latin and possession of a BBC micro is that Latin is software, whereas a BBC micro is hardware, and hardware costs much more to physically reproduce than software does.
How NOT to archive data... (Score:2)
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.
Hey moron, why not move the data over to the new media formats as they gain popularity? This isn't a "write once, throw in closet for all eternity" application we're talking about here - isn't the point to have access to the information? It's not like you need to get monks to spend their lives transcribing text to copy the data - it's already in an electronic form that can be copied automatically and checked against the original with little or no difficulty (unless the data format is proprietary and requires a custom reader that nobody knows how to build, which somehow wouldn't surprise me). And it's not like old formats disappear overnight - there are still people using 8-Tracks and Beta VCRs, so I don't think CDs and DVDs will vanish before the data can be copied (unless the SSSCA takes hold, in which case it won't matter because we won't have control over information anyway). If I can maintain copies of school reports I wrote 15 years ago and have no need to access, why can't people maintain data that cost 2.5 million pounds to gather?
To every medium there is a message (Score:2)
In most cases, forethought can prevent this (Score:2)
Original Article (Score:2, Interesting)
Original Domesday was on display in 2000. (Score:3, Interesting)
I stood in line for 30 minutes so I could see it, and I can assure you it is not perfectly useable. First of all you have to know Latin and how to read really bad handwriting.
You're also not allowed to take pictures of it, and if you try to do that or even touch the book these guys with guns point them at you and say "Don't you dare."
I'd have better chance at decrypting DVDs, or reading the Windows source code than using the original Domesday book.
Doomsday Book (sf novel) (Score:2)
I wonder if that was the idea in Willis' choice of title?
Danny.
Think longer (Score:2)
The other part of this is: What we consider important may not be what historians of the future consider important. They will most likely want to know how we lived, etc. We might save historical records, scientific data, etc but is anyone religiously copying DVDs of popular shows and will they keep doing it for as long as it takes?
So, with your limited resources, what do you save? Apollo mission logs or 'N Sync?
See the problem?
The 1986 version was beautiful (Score:4, Interesting)
A working version IS available (Score:3, Informative)
Last time I was there, the Science Museum in London had a working setup. All they have to do is figure how to hook it up to a CD burner and problem solved
Re:BBC Basic.. wow (Score:2)
Wasn't that Logo? Or could you control it from Basic as well?
For its time, the Beeb had a fantastic BASIC. Introduced me to the idea of subroutines, almost unheard of in a home micro at that time. Still based on line numbers, you could renumber everything with a single command (no more 10 print "hello"; 20 goto 10; 15 Err...do something I'd forgotten about")
It also had a stupidly large number of I/O ports, making it much used in scientific applications.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:lifespan of cds (Score:2)
Re:Archiving Photos Forever? (Score:2)
If the encoding format (e.g. JPEG) is obsolete by that time, then keep the original files but also convert each one as best you can to the current storage format. It would also help to keep a 'changelog' diary describing each conversion, and to include source code for the various conversion utilities that you used. Make sure you also keep off-site backups so that you don't lose everything to fire or theft.