Again fact and fiction

[dieseltaylor]

It is quite humbling to read how a very few people can have a major effect on such a "dead" subject.

(Reuters) - "It was a warm day but I suddenly felt cold," was how Philippa Langley described the powerful sensation she experienced when she walked over the unmarked grave of her hero King Richard III beneath a car park in central England.

One of the greatest archaeological discoveries of recent English history has been driven by one woman's obsession with overturning Shakespeare's portrayal of Richard as a twisted tyrant who murdered two young princes in the Tower of London.

The extraordinary tale of the discovery of the bones of the last English monarch to die in battle combined passion, sleuthing and scholarship with carbon dating, DNA testing and a search for funding worthy of a best-selling detective yarn.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/02/08/uk-britain-richard-idUKBRE91705K20130208

[dieseltaylor]

Funnily enough this is the same kind of thing. One mans long struggle to get the full history into daylight.

Jaws literally dropped as Prof Randell delivered his lecture, he told the BBC. They dropped again in the evening as Prof Randell had arranged for one of Colossus's creators, Allen "Doc" Coombs, to attend and answer questions about the machine and what it did. Prof Randell's lecture and Coombs's comments meant the computer history books would have to be rewritten."Eniac was not the first computer, it was the 11th," he said.

What is much less well known is the tale of how Colossus's story came to be told in the first place. It is a tale of how one man's dogged efforts overcame official secrets and official indifference to rewrite computer history.

Computer scientist Brian Randell was the man who started uncovering the history of Colossus.

That history had to be pried out of the archives because official efforts to cover up its success worked so well. Thousands of people worked in the huts at Bletchley Park during WWII on code-cracking but only a handful were involved with Colossus and fewer still knew everything about it. All those codebreakers signed the Official Secrets Act which demanded that they kept quiet about their wartime career.

Almost all the machines were broken up once they ceased to be useful and design documents were burnt or destroyed at the same time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21384672

[Michael Emrys]

Re Richard III, Josephine Tey wrote an interesting novel which is actually a fictionalized essay on the arguments to rehabilitate the long-dead monarch. It is called The Daughter of Time.

Michael