The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003)

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?

Review: Jo Walton (Tor)

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. ( )