An afternoon hunting for old data reading equipment around the Library’s darkest corners isn’t usually what we do on a Friday, but this afternoon staff from IT and the MabLab project embarked on a treasure hunt of a specialist nature.
MabLab is a Library project examining solutions to the end-to-end processing of born digital archival material, from ingest through preservation to eventual access by researchers, and part of the work might entail using obsolete hardware in order to view digital files created using now obsolete software
The list of treasures found this afternoon included Amstrad, Commodore, Acorn, Spectrum and Phillips PCs, as well as a BBC Domesday computer created specifically to read laser discs containing the Corporation’s Domesday project from 1986.
A short clip of the Domesday computer in the Retro Computer Museum.
The corridors of stack #2
The Copper Room
The Copper Room
Acorn TrackBall