An LV-ROM player

1986 Domesday technical details

Overview
The 1986 Domesday project
Technical details
Rescuing the data

The BBC Domesday Project was produced by a collaboration of BBC, Acorn, Philips and Logica.

Domesday system in action

The hardware for the system centred around the BBC Master computer - an 8-bit computer that along with the "BBC Model B" saw great popularity in UK and Australian schools during the mid-1980s. In order to run the discs, this computer was fitted with a second processor and a SCSI card. A trackerball was plugged into the Master, along with a special new type of videodisc player called an LV-ROM player.

Data was stored on the LV-ROM discs in two ways. Image data was stored as analogue video, either as individual frames or as moving video sequences. Text, statistical and mapping data were stored on the discs digitally, along with the actual application software for the multimedia system, written in a programming language called BCPL.