It's the Domesday system,
and this was a project in 1986 developed by BBC
with a lot of input from BBC Schools.
But it was using brand new technology,
to remember the 900th anniversary of the Domesday book.
This is a modern version of it.
And what it was
was an enormous catalogue
of everything that "William the Conqueror" had conquered.
Although the original Domesday book you can still read,
if you know the language,
these sadly are beginning to fail after barely thirty years.
This was a Phillips laser vision player.
When the coding was first starting, when the first development of the Domesday disc started,
They hadn't even got this particular player ready.
By the time they were testing it they got the prototypes.
There are actually two discs in all;
these are double sided and each surface is an active surface.
The two discs were called the "national disc" and the "community disc",
they had different sorts of content.
They aren't digital discs, so you can't actually say they're
a particular amount of megabytes or gigabytes.
It had actually got tracks on it,
just like frames, analog frames in an old fashioned TV.
Across this width there are 55,000 tracks, which is about half an hours playing time.
Unfortunately this technology, not only the disc but the players are very hard to keep in order.
We have been in touch with Phillips
We can't find anybody who can help us to repair them.
So we've got a couple of players that work fitfully and a few discs that are just about readable.
So this is the 2011 remake of it, using all the original data that has been devised to work on a program on this
touch table but basically using a PC with windows underneath it.
That's where we are now, near Bletchley.
Just about here, keep zooming in
and eventually you get the map as it was in 1986
Put the modern maps on, and you can see the city is now full of housing.
Here is Bletchley, here is what people wrote about Bletchley at the time.
There were pictures, one of the lakes near Bletchley, children biking in the Milton Keynes bowl,
and here is Wellsmead School, the school that contributed this information.
The BBC contacted schools all over the country and invited them to write little bits about the area, about special things about their area,
send in photographs and there was a massive operation digitizing all of that.
Some of it was written on BBC micros, the schools were trying to get their students to learn about using computers within this whole project.
But then that all had to be moved into a standard form. Plugged into what we would now call a geographical information system.
So the country was split into these areas of about 3 by 4 kilometres
So when you did this searching down to a particular area you would then get these little stories or descriptions of the area and the pictures as well.
Of course, it was only cameras in those days. They didn't have smart phones or anything of that sort.
And they would have been film cameras, so they would have sent in actual photographs on photographic paper.
And every picture would have used one single frame and they all would have been indexed.
So there were tens of thousands of pictures, all of which were indexed. When the program was written they had to have all that data,
so that when you clicked on a particular area on the map, it came up with the right pictures and not somewhere else.
--This is just like thirty year old street view, isn't it? --It's exactly like that. There was indeed a walk function within it
where there were certain towns and cities where they did just like street view
and you could turn sideways and backwards onto your direction of travel and look at what was filmed at the time.
This was not done by the schools, this was done by the BBC.
The Domesday disc and all of this hardware cost a great deal of money for schools to buy.
Very quickly the BBC realized they got to produce some other titles
One of those titles was THE ECODISC and another was called VOLCANOES
I was involved in the ECODISC and it was about the ecology of a field study centre
that was in Slapton Ley in South Devon.
And this was much more like some of the educational software BBC schools were producing at the time.
That's the virtual walk, where you could walk around the lake.
But also if you can see the dots that run across the middle there was a walk in a boat - there was a paddle across the middle of it as well.
I was brought in to do the programming of this, it used a language called BCPL.
And we used the same system and the same user interface as the Doomsday discs and we talk about
40 percent of our code was parts of the Doomsday disc code and then we wrote all these additional exercises
that allow students to investigate this field study centre. The plants, the animals, the fishes, the birds etc.
And then there was a module that did the management of it
and they had to work out how to make the field study centre survive and thrive over a prolonged period of time.