tezza wrote:I had to look this one up, as I'd never heard of it.
Interesting. Were the doomsday laserdiscs provided with it the English ones, or was there a local New Zealand "doomsday" project?
The Domesday machines were basically a slightly modified BBC Master attached to a special Laserdisc player. The Domesday control software ran on the BBC Master and produced a video output that was multiplexed with the high quality output from the laserdisc. This resulted in a really nice multimedia interface that combined high quality video and static graphics with the lower quality BBC Master graphics. The Domesday system was a landmark in early multimedia systems, but it was expensive and became an evolutionary dead-end.
I got the opportunity to play with one briefly at an Auckland computer trade show and it made quite an impression on my young self. I can't remember the exact date but it must have been around 1987-1988.
I've seen references to an NZ Domesday disc but I believe that it contains only geographic data. AFAIK there wasn't an NZ equivalent to the UK community disc.