When the BBC's Domesday project was first talked about during an assembly at my school in County Durham in 1986, I was 11 years old, and very impressed by the idea that the information would be recorded on a pair of laser discs (I was probably quite into toy laser guns at the time).
When I later saw the discs, they looked amazing - they were around the size of records, but silver and futuristic.
It certainly didn't occur to me that they would become obsolete, that nobody would have working players on which to look at them and that, in 2003, experts would have to work pretty hard to create a newly readable version.
And I was strangely delighted today when I found, through LinkMachineGo, an online version of the 1986 Domesday project.
The pioneering interactive idea was a huge undertaking to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday book, involving masses of UK information, maps and pictures provided by almost 1 million people.
On the online version, I easily found Lanchester, the village I'm from, which was described as being in an area of "beautiful countryside", stirring a few feelings of homesickness.
The Domesday book also told me that, in 1986, you could buy a four-bedroom detached house there for £60,000 (if only I could have got on the property ladder as an 11-year-old, I'd have made a killing ...).
It also detailed things like the opening times of the library, and how much a local farmer was selling his cattle for (£100 for a calf). Some of the detail was remarkable, given that it was repeated for every town and village across the country.
Why not check it out, find your own home town and take a trip back to the 80s.
