Catching up with Domesday, Andy Finney (Wuthering Bytes 2016)
Channel: AB Open
Date: 2017-08-21

Beeb boffins decide to use obsolete technology’, is what the Sun said about the Domesday Project … many years after the project discs were published in 1986. Of course at the time the technology was cutting edge but it has since become a useful example of digital obsolescence (even though most of the content was analogue). Andy Finney, who was technical lead at the start of the project and went on to produce some of the content, will discuss the context and thinking behind the project’s technical decisions and how, many years later, mass-market technology finally caught up with ... and exceeded ... Domesday’s vision.

* Andy Finney was a radio and TV producer when he discovered interactivity around 1980. He helped to found the BBC Domesday Project, which was published on videodiscs 30 years ago this November, and has worked on various interactive and data-driven projects ever since. 

He started in BBC local radio and his varied career has also included being a radio DJ, co-authoring the standard text on management of interactive projects, devising a highway code for copyright, documenting the early history of a seminal American record label, producing the first consumer optical disc to include data, reviewing projects for the European Commission, resurrecting recordings of a Panzer commander’s war trial, introducing Can to Virgin Records, exploring infrared photography, and managing data on radio and television networks.