The Centre for Computing History in the UK marked the approaching 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project with a museum event on September 19. Mike Tibbetts, who assisted producer Peter Armstrong, said MI5 had taken an interest in the system without understanding its purpose. Armstrong also presented the project to Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, and Tibbetts was unsure that she understood it either.

Armstrong proposed the project as a modern counterpart to the Domesday Book, the survey commissioned after the Norman invasion of England in 1066. That medieval record covered most of England and parts of Wales and helped the king assess payments owed to him. About nine centuries later, more than one million people, including many schoolchildren, contributed material for a snapshot of life across the UK. The team connected those contributions with maps and photographs, then stored the result on two LV-ROM LaserDiscs, the Community Disc and the National Disc. Users accessed them through a BBC Master and a Philips VP415 LaserVision player. The documented hardware also included an Acorn Master AIV and a Marconi RB2 trackerball.

The team developed the system from 1984 to 1986 and released it at the end of 1986 for educational institutions and libraries. Sales were weak. A unit probably cost about £5,000, while government subsidies reduced the price to roughly £3,000. That remained too expensive for much of the intended audience. Tibbetts argued that the archive will gain historical value with age, just as the original Domesday Book eventually did. Its vellum pages have survived for 940 years, while the project’s custom technology was overtaken within a few years by widely available media.

The technical choices made sense in 1984. The BBC Micro could produce a 625-line television image, and Philips LaserVision could be adapted to carry alphanumeric data. Few suitable authoring or playback tools existed, so the team had to create its own. The discs later became hard to read, and the costly LV-ROM player quickly lost ground to CD-ROM and DVD hardware. Limited academic interest put the archive at risk of disappearing. Several preservation efforts followed, and the anniversary event also highlighted that work.

About 60 people worked directly under Tibbetts and Armstrong, with another 60 in subcontracted teams. At the first team meeting after Christmas in January 1986, the project’s VAX minicomputer reportedly had no data ready for the discs. The team completed the work within a few months. Andy Finney, who handled disc mastering, recalled that the original design called for a mouse. The team chose a trackball because it was considered easier for people with movement disabilities, but later regarded the decision as a mistake after seeing users struggle to reach the bottom of the screen.

Simon Inns of the Domesday86 project described preservation as a race against failing hardware and bit rot. The discs have been preserved in the Internet Archive, where anyone can download a Domesday Disc. Few original hardware systems remain operational. Inns hopes that people attending the Centre for Computing History will be able to use a complete Domesday system within the next couple of years.