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Bezig met laden... The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003)door Francis Spufford
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. This is the second Francis Spufford book that I've read, after Red Plenty, and is similarly beautifully written and very well explained. Highly recommended. ( ) British non-fiction author writes a love letter to technology. He covers the period from post-WWII British rocketry, through the supersonic Concorde, software startups, cell phones, and mapping the human genome. He's a wonderful writer, with an amazing gift for the delicious anecdote. There was a computer game in the 1980s that sold 150,000 copies -- the same as the number of BBC Micro computers in the world, and that release only ran on the BBC Micro. How's that for market penetration? Six vignettes from the post-war history of British engineering - the Black Arrow rocket, Concorde, the computer game Elite, Vodafone, the Human Genome project, and Beagle 2. Illustrates the changing relationship between science/engineering, government and business. Very interesting read as even if you already know one or two of the topics it's unlikely that you'd know them all and hence the comparisons reveal something new about how Britain has changed over the last five decades. Six vignettes of plucky Brits battling against the odds, and doing things that have never been done before ... and in some cases, or since. I have to say that I found the writing to be pretty poor, but the stories are quite amazing. The British space rocket that put the Prospero satellite in orbit in 1971 (and it's still up there); Concorde, the only successful SST - about to be pulled from the skies in the 1980s, but taken over by British Airways and turned into a profit-maker; Elite - the computer game that broke the mould; why Vodaphone is the world leader in mobile telephony; how Michael Morgan, John Sulston and the Sanger Centre beat Craig Venter at the game of mapping the human genome; and the story of the Beagle 2 - the British contribution to exploration of Mars (almost). Incredible hidden history that really deserves to be much more widely known.
A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite:
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. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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