“To mark the impending 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project's release, the UK's Centre for #ComputingHistory #CCH hosted a celebration at its museum on September 19, bringing together several of the original team members responsible for the system. One was Mike Tibbetts, an assistant to Peter Armstrong, the #BBC producer behind the project. Tibbetts revealed that the UK's domestic intelligence service, MI5, took an interest in the system, but "they didn't understand a word of what we were doing!"
"And on one occasion, Peter and I had to give a presentation, or Peter gave the presentation to [former prime minister] Margaret Thatcher, and well, I'm not sure she understood what we were doing either…"
What they were doing was compiling a trove of data that will prove invaluable to historians in the years to come, even if the politicians of the era looked nervously on at the amount of data being handed over to the public. The #DomesdayProject was intended to be a modern version of the #DomesdayBook, compiled after the 1066 #Norman invasion of #England.”
#CHH / #VLROM / #Doomesday86 <https://theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/04/spies-prime-ministers-and-balls-the-bbc-domesday-project-40/5300383>