Whatever happened to... the BBC Domesday Project?

QIn the 1980s, my kids got excited about contributing to a digital version of the Domesday Book. They brought forms home from school that asked questions about our family life, which we filled in and returned, but then nothing seemed to happen. My girls are grown up now and don’t remember anything coming of it, either. Do you know what happened? Dominic Ryan

AYou’re talking about the BBC’S Domesday Project. The idea was to bring William the Conqueror’s original great survey bang up to date with new nationwide research, which was stored digitally on Laserdiscs – a forerunner of CDS and DVD-ROMS, and a cutting-edge technology at the time.

Work began in 1984 and, among other things, saw schools in the UK invited to produce content about their local area. The country was carved up into tens of thousands of 4x3km rectangles, known as D-blocks, with each assigned storage space for a handful of photos and some descriptive text. Your children’s contributions would have been destined for one of these D-blocks, with selected data making its way on to what was dubbed the Community Disc. A second Laserdisc, called the National Disc, was produced directly by the BBC, and contained information of broader interest.

The project was completed in 1986 and made available to anyone who had enough money to buy the necessary equipment — meaning a BBC Master computer, a Philips Laserdisc drive and the Domesday Project discs. Unfortunately, this little lot added up to several thousand pounds, so uptake was very limited and an ambition to update the information regularly was abandoned in the face of commercial reality.

A few working setups still exist, including one at Bletchley Park’s National Museum of Computing ( www.

snipca.com/24141). You can also see the contents of the Community Disc at the BBC’S Domesday Reloaded website, at

www.snipca.com/24142 — so go there to hunt for your daughters’ entries.