british life has not had such smooth sailing. the bbc's rory kellen-jones has this story. >> reporter: 1986 and the groundbreaking scheme is recording daily life in britain. >> the first thing we want to do is put in the amenity count. how do we do that? >> reporter: the doomsday project gathered up schoolchildren, women's institutes and other groups to describe their area in words and pictures. >> this is user-generated content. and it was a bit like google maps as you would say now but all of this is 25 years ago where all of this had to be invented. >> reporter: now some of those involved are getting a chance to look at what they wrote then. >> i'm 8 and i like fashionable clothes like jumpsuits. i still like fashionable clothes but not quite like jumpsuits. but it's bizarre just reading that because it's completely different to what i remember. >> reporter: the idea was that every school and library would end up with one of these doomsday systems. made up of a bbc microcomputer and state-of-the-art laser disks to display the data. the trouble was this technology was soon out of date.