Photos: BBC's life in the 1980s Domesday Project reborn as touchscreen exhibition

Digital display showcases two different views of life in Britain 25 years apart...

A digital record of life in 1980s Britain has been transformed into a touchscreen exhibition at The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC).

The BBC Domesday Project captured a digital snapshot of maps, photos and stories of life across the UK in 1986.

Records from the project - together with maps, photos, videos and stories gathered from volunteers across Britain in 2011 - are being made available on a 52-inch touchscreen table display at TNMOC.

The Domesday Project was launched in 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book.

Content for the original project in 1986 was digitally etched onto LaserDiscs and displayed using a BBC Master computer. The relatively high cost of the hardware and the rapid development of technology saw the system used to display the project quickly become obsolete, leading to few people seeing the finished product.

Two Domesday Touchtables exist - one at TNMOC and the other at MediaCityUK in Salford - while the Domesday Touchtable application will be made available to other museums that have the technology to host it.

The new Domesday Touchtable at TNMOC sits alongside a hands-on exhibit of the original Domesday System that ran the 1986 BBC Domesday Project. Both are set in the context of a gallery about the BBC Computer Literacy Project, which inspired a generation of computer programmers, and the origins of the BBC Micro in the 1980s.

The Domesday Project display will be open to the public from Saturday 10 December during TNMOC's usual opening times.

Seen here is Chris Monk, learning co-ordinator at TNMOC, looking through one of the LaserDiscs used in the Domesday Project.

"This new display is a marvellous addition to the museum where we tell the story of our digital heritage from the world's first modern computer, Colossus, to the present day.

"The 1980s was a remarkable period for British computing and the 1986 BBC Domesday Project was a real landmark in education and a clear demonstration of the way information storage and handling was being transformed," Kevin Murrell, a director and trustee at TNMOC, said in a statement.

The Domesday Touchtable can be used by four people at once, allowing them to pinch, zoom and rotate the material from the Domesday project.

The Domesday Project, with content from 1986 and 2011, is available online at the BBC's Domesday Reloaded website.

Over 100,000 people accessed the database on the launch of Domesday Reloaded this year. On average one quarter of a million pages are viewed on the site each week.