Date   : Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:49:14 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Domesday Disaster

David Hunt wrote:
> I don't think BBC Worldwide ever relinqushed their Copyright on the content

As I was told by the Camileon people, the problem isn't that they don't want 
to relinquish their copyright, but that they no longer know themselves who 
owns what copyright on the various bits of data. I believe that at the time 
some of the stuff on the discs was still technically owned by people other 
than the BBC, and the BBC were just given permission to include it on the 
Domesday media (with no agreement over what might be done with it in the future).

I'd got the impression that the BBC would love to have the data available, but 
that the red tape means it just can't be done at present.

> I remember someone being paid by the Government to migrate the applications
> and data to Windows (some nightmare involving serial ports and frame
> grabbers), but I've never seen them. 

That'd either be Camileon at Leeds/Michigan universities, or Adrian Pearce who 
rescued the data for the National Archives. Both projects successfully pulled 
all the data off the discs and implemented modern applications to access it.

see:

http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/domesday/domesday.html
http://www.longlifedata.co.uk

... neither group are allowed to release the data because of the copyright 
issues, but Adrian's effort does include web-based access to it.

Interestingly, there was a third effort to rescue the data on to modern media, 
done by none other than Acorn themselves. Well, sort of. A group of employees 
in their R+D department were working on it as a lunchtime project and got 
quite a way towards completion using parts scavenged from the stores - trouble 
was, this was at the time of the Pace takeover and everything got shut down 
right in the middle of things. To my knowledge nothing survives of this 
attempt, although it's possible some of the work's still lurking on a hard 
disk somewhere in an ex-employee's house :-)

Acorn also released a product for accessing and integrating Domesday data into 
various other applications (text documents, spreadsheets, standalone frame 
grabs etc.). Bonus points for remembering what it was called, as I can't! ;) 
(I've got a copy back in the UK, but the name's eluding me right now). Might 
have been "Domesday Retrieval", but I may have just made that up...

The good news is that the data is out there and preserved, even if us mere 
mortals can't have full unrestricted access to it (yet) :-)

What nobody seems to know, or have, is the Research Machines application / 
setup notes for their version of the Domesday system. I've never been able to 
confirm if it even ran over SCSI to the VP-415 or serial as there seem to be 
equal numbers of people who say one way or the other. Not that it matters in 
the context of preserving the data; I'd just like to see it some time (by all 
accounts it was crap compared to Acorn's effort!)

cheers

Jules