Happy Birthday, WWW!

April 30, 2008 By 1 Comment

The BBC reported today, that the World-Wide-Web is celebrating its 15th birthday. This is because the first web technology was released by CERN on 30th April, 1993.

It’s not an event that I remember experiencing, although I know that I was in my second year at university and getting ready to go to Germany for my placement year, so I dug out my diary from that year to have a look.

Apparently I didn’t have any lectures on that day and stayed at home to do homework and revision, which I guess is not very exciting compared to the birth of the web!

I remember at the time using an information system called Gopher and my first contact with a web browser was with NCSA Mosaic in September 1994 when I arrived back at university for my final year.

It was then that I started to design web pages. My final year project for my computer science course was to design the website for the Department of Languages and European Studies, which included looking at the different technologies and where it was all going.

The site was basic by today’s standards, but it used an interesting feature of colour-coded links to show which pages were public and which were only available on the campus, as well as a separate colour for external links.

There were experimental audio files in WAV format and video files in Quicktime, as well as a selection of photographs provided by other students – often displayed with only 256 colours.

Many of the pages stayed online after I had graduated and have only been replaced within the last year years. I still have the source code to those pages, but you are unlikely to find them anywhere online now. To get some idea of how the site looked, there is a page of the main department site on archive.org which shows how the links were colour-coded.

I would have liked to have compared what I wrote back then about the future of the web with what has actually happened since, but although I have the project work backed up and readily available, I have been struggling to open the file containing my summary. It is another example of digital obsolescence as even with the wide variety of software and operating systems available to me I have not managed it yet!

I guess I will have to dig out the printed version of the project or return to the original PC that I wrote it on, providing it still works after all this time (and I was pushing it to the limit back then!)

The web has revolutionised the way that we work with and think about information, and back in 1995 when I was finishing off my project work I am sure that I would have written something about the forthcoming changes in peoples’ attitudes to working with the web and the availability of information.

But after all that has changed over the past 15 years, sometimes it is still the printed word that is easiest to retrieve.

Filed Under: Cymeradwyo, Internet Tagged With: , ,

Demonstrations in Madrid

April 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I was in Madrid last weekend for the Great Madrid Escape, when on Saturday afternoon – with not too much to due thanks to the weather – I ventured out of my hotel only to be confronted by police cars blocking off the street.
It turned out that a demonstration was about to take place and I stayed to watch and found out what it was all about.

The flyer that one of the passing demonstratos gave to me explained the main reason for the march. The week before there had been attacks by a group of right-wing “terrorists” who had thrown bottles and stones, requiring at least one person to need medical treatment.
They claim that was not an isolated incident, and that these “terrorists” are part of the far-right, neo-nazi scene, who want other people to be afraid to go out on the streets.
For this reason they organised the demonstration as an act of public defiance, to show that the working people of Madrid will not tolerate such violence in their city.
I have a feeling that many of the people there came with groups that have other main causes – the large red, yellow and purple flag for example was being carried by a group who wanted to make Spain a republic and to do away with the monarchy.
What fascinated me most was how different it was compared to such an event in Germany. Here, many people would turn away – in Madrid many passers-by stopped to listen and even take photographs. There were even family members walking alongside the march and passing in drinks to the marchers.
I often wonder if we do enough in Germany to stand up for our rights. The Spanish, or at least the Madrileños are definitely more passionate about theirs!

Filed Under: Cymeradwyo, Western Europe Tagged With: , ,

Whatever happened to… the Domesday Discs?

April 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Who remembers the BBC Domesday Project and the resulting Domesday Discs?

Well, I do at least. I’m not quite sure why, but the other day I started wondering what had happened to the project and the collected data.

Never heard of the project? Well, back in 1984 the BBC started a project with a number of companies to create a modern version of the Domesday book which was due to celebrate its 900th anniversary in 1986. School children were asked to write about their local area and send in photographs. All of this data was then collated onto two laser discs, along with statistics such as census data as well as maps, short videos and virtual walks around parts of the country. The texts that the children had written were saved as teletext pages and the whole thing required a specially adapted BBC micro computer to run.

I’m not quite sure if I ever wrote anything in school that got submitted to the project, but I do remember some years later when the discs were available that we didn’t have them at my school or in our local library, so when a set became available at another school it was arranged for me to spend an evening looking at them.

In the days before the World Wide Web and all the modern sources of information that are now available, this was a fascinating project of which I know no equal, and a few days ago I started wondering what had happened to all of that data and I was surprised to find an answer so quickly just by searching the internet.

Actually, what seemed like a revolution in terms of the amount of data back then is by comparison today quite small. Each of the laser discs could store 300MB on each side, meaning the combination of both sides stored less than a data CD today.

Recently, a project had been set up to recover the data and make it readable again. This included reverse engineering a set of discs to convert the data into modern formats. I read all about this at a fascinating website called Domesday Redux. Then I came across another site about the history of the project.

But the main surprise was this site: www.domesday1986.com – this is the result of that reverse engineering, an online version of the community disc (the one with the children’s texts and photos on).

I have been able to re-visit texts about places that I used to live and go to school in, and I have seen photos of those places as they were in 1984-1986, even one showing my school and the house that I used to live in!

Visiting that site is a real treat and I am so glad to have found it. Let’s hope that it remains on-line as long as possible so that future generations can learn about how we put together this amazing collection of information – without writing a single E-mail!

Filed Under: Computers, Cymeradwyo

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