Back in the mid 1980’s I was taking my first detailed history lessons in school. It was always a subject that fascinated me, just the thought of learning about past cultures and races made my mind race at a thousand miles per hour.
Halfway through the lesson, my history teacher wheeled in a large computer that by todays standards was the size of a server, but back then it was as high-tech as a MacBook Pro.
The computer had a disc drive the size of a shopping trolley yet when the teacher pulled out the large 12” gold disc and put it in the machine it was like seeing the future unfold before my very eyes. This was just after CD’s were in the stores, years before DVD and Blu-Ray were even thought of.
This was the Doomsday Project
A project ran by Acorn Computers and the BBC, its aim was to provide school children in 1986 to write their own accounts and journals of where they lived, what they did, also how they were. Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of significant landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.
When I look back, it was almost like the grandfather of Wikipedia. Handing over material to be scripted by teenagers that would last into the archives for eternity. As technology advanced so the past gets left behind, yet what the Doomsday Project gave us was a chance to secure ourselves in the historical archives of life.
Many bury time capsules that will simply never be found, I found Doomsday to be a fantastic way of using the available technology of that period to capture history in the making, through they eyes of teenagers. Every twenty years history would be able to be captured in a new and exciting way.
It is a shame that politics ended this remarkable project.
For those who want to reminisce about what it was like, click here.
