Domesday Reloaded

The BBC has today relaunched their 1980's Domesday project on the web as Domeday Reloaded. The project started in 1986 and over a million members of the public contributed to it, collecting data about their local area that they thought would be interesting in 1,000 years time. The data was then packed onto 2 special laser disks that could only be read by a BBC Master computer running special software. Due to quick obsolescence of the hardware, the data soon became almost impossible to access.

Recently a team has taken the disks and painstakingly taken the analog data from them to recreate it all on a website.

The project split the country into 23,000 squares, or D-Blocks and each was assigned to a volunteer to record. I remember going on walks with my Dad in 1986 to take pictures of our assigned D-Blocks.