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...

Good book on this (and similar) subjects:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British/...

He recounts to Francis Spufford here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British/...

that he learned to program on an Acorn Atom.

Still got mine :)

According to this excellent book I read:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British/...

Venter also wanted to patent the whole human genome once he'd sequenced it. It was only by a huge and expensive effort by the Wellcome charity that the genome was sequenced and made freely available. If you enjoy reading ..AGAAACCATCAGCACA.. then:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3501

This is also discussed in the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project

Anyway, the book I linked to is great fun.