BBC Domesday Book 'saved'

The BBC's Domesday Book project was a worthy one, and captured the state of the nation 900 years after the original. Unfortunately it foundered on problems with its implementation -- non-standard data accessed from a non-standard computer. Now, however, a project has "developed software which emulates the obsolete BBC computer and video disc player and makes the material accessible on a modern computer", says the VNUnet report here. But don't be too harsh on the BBC, because its local stupidity is just a small example of global stupidity. The world is full of people who spend all their time worrying about cheap, transitory things like operating systems (Microsoft cases, passim) while almost no-one worries about the hugely expensive, very long term problems of storing data in readable formats. It's tempting to wonder what the creators of the original Domesday Book would have said if you'd told them their work would be unreadable in a decade.