Backroom boys
A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers. The book contains chapters on the Beagle II, Elite - the 80s computer game, the Blue Streak missile, Concorde, mobile phone technology and the Human Genome Project, among others. Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting with this forgotten episode, 'Backroom Boys' tells the bittersweet story of how one country lost its industrial tradition and got back something else. Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars. 'Backroom Boys' is a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, to those whose imaginings take shape not in words but in mild steel and carbon fibre and lines of code. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means.
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2010–2025years
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What Hacker News says
- You would probably enjoy the book “Backroom Boys” by Francis Spufford.
- It's not quite what you're asking (more about engineering, and only post-war British projects, from Black Knight to the Beagle probe), but Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford is very interesting.
I especially liked the battle to sequence and publish the human genome before Celera could do the same and slap down a patent on it. The story of the development of Elite is also a fun insight into the challenges of programming in the 80s where every byte mattered.
- Several books could be written on the subject. My personal recommendation is Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/14/featuresreview...
A lot of this needs to be seen in the context of post-imperial decline, and (in the 70s at least) serious financial difficulties. We could probably have made some of TSR2, Black Arrow, Magnox, APT, Concorde, Trident/Polaris, etc big successes with adequate funding, but we could never have done all of them. It looks like Concorde was one of the ones that was chosen to be funded to completion, partly due to the personal intervention of Tony Benn.
(Possible counterexample: the three V-bombers)
A lot of things were funded to the first failure but not to the first success. A common problem - NASA would never have been able to do what SpaceX did because the funding would have been pulled on the first failed landing, despite this being an anticipated part of the development plan.
In the private sector, any history of this would have to cover the class system and industrial action. Also CP Snow's "Two Cultures".
I would probably also list the UK's small mindedness towards immigration; the US was a magnet for fleeing scientists and intellectual refugees after the war. Much of SV's success is due to immigration or internal migration: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...
- This is indeed an excellent article, I just want to add that Red Plenty is an amazing example of "Scientist Fiction" (http://bactra.org/notebooks/scientist-fiction.html - see also - https://www.librarything.com/tag/scientist+fiction) and definitely deserves to be read if you have any interest in technology, data, economics.
Spufford also wrote The Backroom Boys (https://www.amazon.com/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British/d...) about British tech after WWII, definitely worth a read even if Red Plenty remains unsurpassed.
I'll also add the Wayback Machine for the (now defunct) website created by the author for Red Plenty: https://web.archive.org/web/20160713031430/http://www.redple...
- Seconded, and Backroom Boys [1] by the same author, is very enjoyable, too, even if Red Plenty is really in a league of its own.
1: http://www.amazon.com/The-Backroom-Boys-Secret-British/dp/05...
- I hadn't realised Colin Pillinger had died. I've found the news oddly affecting considering I never met the guy. :(
(For anyone interested in the background to the Beagle2 probe, 'Backroom Boys'[1] includes a great chapter on it, and Prof Pillinger's involvement .)
[1]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British-...
