The New York Times used a proprietary search tool to find more than 5,300 files containing over 38,000 references to Trump, his wife, Mar-a-Lago, and related terms in the Epstein documents released Friday. The files include unverified tips submitted to the FBI — some accusing Trump and Epstein of sexual abuse — as well as interview notes where victims describe interactions with Trump. — Read the rest

The post NYT finds 38,000+ Trump references in released Epstein documents appeared first on Boing Boing.

In April 1951, Jack Kerouac taped together sheets of tracing paper to avoid the interruption of changing pages, then typed the first draft of On the Road in a three-week burst. The scroll — 121 feet of continuous typescript with no paragraph breaks, using the real names of his friends before the publisher made him change them — goes to auction at Christie's on March 12, with an estimate of $2.5 to $4 million, reports The Guardian. — Read the rest

The post Kerouac's 121-foot scroll of On the Road goes to auction for up to $4M appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2007, Ibrahim Diallo switched to Dish Network and got an RF remote — the kind that doesn't need line-of-sight. A few months later, his loud neighbor switched to Dish as well. Same remote, same frequency.

"One day, I was in the living room watching TV when the channel just flipped," Diallo writes. — Read the rest

The post His neighbor was too noisy, so he used an RF remote to train him like a circus animal appeared first on Boing Boing.

Trump announced Sunday that he plans to close the Kennedy Center for roughly two years for construction, with the closure beginning on July 4 — America's 250th anniversary. "I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World," he wrote on Truth Social, reports The Washington Post. — Read the rest

The post Trump shuts down Kennedy Center; nearly all programming heads have quit appeared first on Boing Boing.

The newly released Epstein documents include over 1,000 files naming Vladimir Putin and nearly 10,000 mentioning Moscow, reports the Daily Mail. Intelligence sources told the paper they believe Epstein was running "the world's largest honeytrap operation" on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates — and that he secured audiences with Putin even after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. — Read the rest

The post Epstein files contain 1,056 documents mentioning Putin and 9,629 mentioning Moscow appeared first on Boing Boing.

Essential to Caribbean classics like the Daiquiri or Piña Colada, rum tends to conjure the climate of its native tropics. When shaken or swizzled and paired with the bright kick of citrus or a mountain of crushed ice, the sugarcane spirit demonstrates its inherent refreshing qualities. But throw it into the mixing glass alongside—or in lieu of—whiskey in an Old-Fashioned or swap it in for gin in a winterized Negroni, and rum shows off its impressive adaptability to cool-weather cocktails. Here are some of our favorites that demonstrate just that.

TL;DR: Get a Microsoft 365 1-year subscription on sale for $69.99 (MSRP $99.99).

We don't need to sell you on Microsoft Word. Or Excel. You've used them for years, probably most of your life, and now, you can get them all at a steep discount with this Microsoft 365 deal. — Read the rest

The post 30% off Microsoft 365 is productivity, but slightly less soul-crushing appeared first on Boing Boing.

Meanwhile, in France

*At least those Hebdo cartoonists know what a slaughterhouse looks like

A combination of what's happened to polls in Denmark and Canada (again), along with our UK polling and focus groups over the past few weeks has made me revise upward what I think the likelihood and impact of a Trump effect on UK electoral politics could be.

Firstly, it is fair to say that Trump has been close to the top of every focus group we've run in the New Year. Responses include: "I feel he's pushing us towards world war three" or, when asked what the biggest threat to the UK was: "I think Trump, full stop". People are genuinely worried/discombobulated/scared.

We also know Trump is unpopular in the UK, with a -40 net approval rating. People don't like his domestic or foreign policies, but it is more a sense that, as countless people have said in groups, versions of, "he makes me worried for the world my kids will grow up in".

On politics, then - and the immediate challenge it poses is to Nigel Farage and Reform - just over half of voters say calling Farage 'Britain's Trump' describes him well. In groups that include Reform-curious voters, we hear worries that Farage would be too like Trump, or controlled by him.

Only 17% think being Britain's Trump is a good thing. In groups and polling, we have tended to find that allegations of racism at school don't tend to move voters (progressives are an exception, but unlikely to vote Reform anyway). Nor does the 'defections = recycled Tories'.

But the Trump link does.

This seems to be particularly true of female voters. Making gains with women has been vital for Reform's rise in the polls. They actually have a more even gender balance among their voters than the Labour Party now, whose support is now very male.

But women are especially likely to say that Trump is a barrier to voting for Reform UK. It came out particularly strongly in our focus group of mothers in Stevenage, Herts, who had voted Labour and were now considering Reform. You can read my write up of it here.

A focus group this week found there is concern about the Reform UK leader's relationship with the US president.

A reasonable challenge is Trump won't be in office then - but that assumes:

• a 2029 general election
• that his successor isn't continuity MAGA
• or that it doesn't leave people worried about that style of politics.

There's also the possibility of a National Rally president in France.

The flip side is that geopolitical risk makes it harder for Starmer to achieve domestic priorities. If there isn't sufficient progress on the domestic front, people think it's worth taking the gamble anyway. It hasn't yet toppled Reform from poll position, and even in Canada it also required a change of leader from Justin Trudeau to Mark Carney.

But Trump probably poses the biggest current risk to Reform, and from a point of pure electability it is surely going to drive more moments where Farage (as on ICE) has to part with the US President. To date that hasn't led to voters thinking they're not pals, but it might in future.

This article is reposted with permission from a Twitter thread by Luke Tryl. You can find others here.

With a thematic issue on a vital topic - the rise child poverty, ending on a hopeful note. You will find sharp analyses on the effect of poverty on children's lives, with a spotlight on the communities that are on the front line of deprivation, with personal stories and shared solutions. Click on the image to gain access to it, or find us on Substack.

Journalism by the people, for the people.

The post Is Nigel Farage Britain's Trump? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

I've been working on my blog software (a static site generator) and I managed to screw things up enough that random old posts got published on the site and in the RSS feed.

As soon as I saw the issue I fixed it, but I've been getting email from folks about some of the posts, so I know they got picked up by some RSS readers.

Those posts are ancient! Sorry for the confusion.

I am giving an illustrated lecture about Colin O'Brien, the Clerkenwell Photographer, on Tuesday 10th February at 6:30pm at Islington Museum, 245 St John St, EC1V 4NB. Entry is free and no booking is required, just come along.

Accident, daytime 1957

When Colin O'Brien (1940-2016) was growing up in Victoria Dwellings on the corner of Clerkenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd, there was a very unfortunate recurring problem which caused all the traffic lights at the junction to turn green at once. In the living room of the top floor flat where Colin lived with his parents, an ominous "crunch" would regularly be heard, occasioning the young photographer to lean out of the window with his box brownie camera and take the spectacular car crash photographs that you see here. Unaware of Weegee's car crash photography in New York and predating Warhol's fascination with the car crash as a photographic motif, Colin O'Brien's car crash pictures are masterpieces in their own right.

Yet, even though they possess an extraordinary classically composed beauty, these photographs do not glamorise the tragedy of these violent random events - seen, as if from God's eye view, they expose the hopeless pathos of the situation. And, half a century later, whilst we all agree that these accidents were profoundly unfortunate for those involved, I hope it is not in poor taste to say that, in terms of photography they represent a fortuitous collision of subject matter and nascent photographic talent. I say this because I believe that the first duty of any artist is to witness what is in front of you, and this remarkable collection of pictures which Colin took from his window - dating from the late forties when he got his first camera at the age of eight until the early sixties when the family moved out - is precisely that.

I accompanied Colin when he returned to the junction of the Clerkenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd in the hope of visiting the modern buildings upon the site of the former Victoria Dwellings. To our good fortune, once we explained the story, Tomasz, the superintendent of Herbal Hill Buildings, welcomed Colin as if he were one of current residents who had simply been away for the weekend. Magnanimously, he handed over the keys of the top flat on the corner  - which, by a stroke of luck, was vacant - so that Colin might take pictures from the same vantage point as his original photographs.

We found a split-level, four bedroom penthouse apartment with breathtaking views towards the City, complete with statues, chandeliers and gold light switches. It was very different to the poor, three room flat Colin lived in with his parents where his mother hung a curtain over the gas meter. Yet here in this luxury dwelling, the melancholy of the empty rooms was inescapable, lined with tired beige carpet and haunted with ghost outlines of furniture that had been taken away. However, we had not come to view the property but to look out of the window and after Colin had opened three different ones, he settled upon the perspective that most closely correlated to his parents' living room and leaned out.

"The Guinness ad is no longer there," he commented - almost surprised - as if, somehow, he expected the reality of the nineteen fifties might somehow be restored. Apart from the blocks on the horizon, little had changed, though. The building on the opposite corner was the same then, the tube embankment and bridge were unaltered, the Booth's Distillery building in Turnmills St still stood, as does the Clerkenwell Court House where Dickens once served as cub reporter. I left Colin to his photography as he became drawn into his lens, looking back into the midst of the last century and upon the urban landscape that contained the emotional history of his youth.

"It was the most exciting day of my life, when we left," admitted Colin, with a fond grin of reminiscence, "Canvassers from the Labour Party used to come round asking for our votes and my father would ask them to build us better homes, and eventually they did. They built Michael Cliffe House, a tower block in Clerkenwell, and offered us the choice of any flat. My parents wanted one in the middle but I said, 'No, let's get the top flat!' and I have it to this day.  I took a photo of lightning over St Paul's from there, and then I ran down to Fleet St and sold it to the Evening Standard."

Colin O'Brien's car crash photographs fascinate me with their intense, macabre beauty. As bystanders, unless we have specialist training, car crashes only serve to emphasise the pain of our helplessness at the destructive intervention of larger forces, and there is something especially plangent about these forgotten car crashes of yesteryear. In a single violent event, each one dramatises the sense of loss that time itself engenders, as over the years our tenderest beloved are taken from us. And they charge the photographic space, so that even those images without crashes acquire an additional emotionalism, the poignancy of transience and the imminence of potential disaster. I can think of no more touching image of loneliness that the anonymous figure in Colin O'Brien's photograph, crossing the Clerkenwell Rd in the snow on New Year's Eve, 1961.

After he had seen the interior of Herbal Hill Buildings, Colin confided to me he would rather live in Victoria Dwellings that stood there before, and yet, as he returned the keys to Tomasz, the superintendent, he could not resist asking if he might return and take more pictures in different conditions, at a different time of day or when it was raining. And Tomasz graciously assented as long as the apartment remained vacant.

I understood that Colin needed the opportunity to come back again, once that the door to the past had been re-opened, and, I have to confess to you that, in spite of myself, I could not resist thinking, "Maybe there'll be a car crash next time?" Yet Colin never did go back and now he is gone from this world too.

Accident in the rain.

Accident in the rain, 2.

Accident at night, 1959.

Snow on New Year's Eve, 1961.

Trolley buses, nineteen fifties.

Clerkenwell Italian parade, nineteen fifties.

Firemen at Victoria Dwellings, nineteen fifties.

Have a Guinness when you're tired.

Colin's photograph of the junction of the Clerkenwell Rd and Faringdon Rd, taken from Herbal Hill Buildings on the site of the former Victoria Dwellings.

When Colin O'Brien saw his childhood view for the first time in fifty years.

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O'Brien

Want to know more about the new John Higgs book about David Lynch? Check out his podcast on the "Highly Irregular" podcast with host John Bernard. 

More news, including UK appearances to discuss the book, on the latest free issue of his Substack newsletter. There is also a paid tier now, as the newsletter explains. 

The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), based in Thetford, has run its weekly Garden BirdWatch (GBW) survey since 1995. This makes it one of the longest running continuous citizen science surveys monitoring garden wildlife in the world. The GBW survey has helped us understand the important role of gardens as habitats for wildlife. At the same time, it, identifies how and why populations of garden birds and other wildlife are changing, and how we can help them. 

Many people have heard of and taken part in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, which takes place annually during the last weekend in January. The BTO Garden BirdWatch is similar to the RSPB's annual survey, in that it gets citizens involved in science. However, its year-round approach and long-term volunteer commitment delivers fine-scale information on both seasonal and longer-term patterns in garden use.

To take part in GBW, people simply register anytime on the BTO website (www.bto.org/gbw). The key to GBW is consistency, so how you monitor the birds in your garden doesn't matter, so long as you do it the same way each week. Some BTO Garden BirdWatchers (GBWers) have an allocated time every week to observe the comings and goings in their garden. Others glance out of a window every time they pass and record what they see. 

The advantage of participating every week is that GBWers are the first to notice change. This has put the survey at the forefront of leading research into the decline of some of our most loved garden birds. For example, in the mid 2000s, when greenfinch numbers began to decrease in UK gardens, it was GBWers who first picked up the decline; and, because many were also involved in a sister programme looking at disease, their observations helped to link this to an emerging infectious disease called finch trichomonosis. 

Further work, involving BTO and partners, revealed that the disease is caused by a microscopic parasite. It most likely spilled over from woodpigeons whose garden populations have been increasing, and which are known to carry the parasite. This prompted a major effort to raise awareness of the importance of good bird feeder hygiene, encouraging those people who put food out for their garden birds to clean their feeders regularly. Finch trichomonosis continues to be monitored by GBWers, and the science teams at BTO are continuing to study how this disease is spread between individuals, so best-practice feeding advice can be refined.

GBWers have helped us understand the changing behaviours of several species. The blackcap is a species of warbler which breeds in British hedgerows and migrates south to the Mediterranean for the winter. In recent decades, the number of blackcaps over-wintering in the UK has increased substantially. BTO research has shown this is partly thanks to supplementary feeding in gardens.

These wintering blackcaps originate not from the UK, but from breeding grounds across a swathe of European countries (from northern Spain to Poland), while our UK breeding birds continue to migrate to the Mediterranean.

Studies have shown that not only is there an evolutionary change in their migratory and feeding behaviours, but the blackcaps that overwinter in the UK are different physically to our breeding birds; they have relatively narrower bills and more rounded wingtips, linked to their more generalist diet and shorter migrations.

GBW is not just about monitoring birds. Participants are also invited to monitor mammals, reptiles, amphibians and selected invertebrates as part of their weekly observations. This has led to some interesting research highlighting the importance of gardens for species which are in serious decline elsewhere in the British landscape.

Hedgehogs are classed as Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, following a significant decline of between 30-75% in some areas of the UK since 2000. The reasons for this include habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, the use of pesticides and herbicides and climate change.

In the wider countryside, hedgehog numbers have declined to the point of localised extinction. However, in urban or suburban areas, gardens are seen as a refuge, and GBW data has been used to show that with wildlife friendly gardening practices, hedgehogs can thrive.

Similarly, a paper published by BTO in 2023, showed that between 2007 and 2020, half of the butterfly species monitored by GBWers increased in their abundance in gardens. Butterfly data from GBW were compared with figures from the wider countryside, suggesting that some butterflies are faring better in gardens than elsewhere.

Around the UK, the top two bird species have swapped places over the course of the past 30 years, but based on the 2025 data, robin is number one, followed closely by blackbird, then blue tit. Woodpigeon comes in at number four, which is interesting as they only entered the Top Ten in 2004. This highlights the increase in their population in line with other more generalist species frequenting gardens, such as magpies (that entered the Top Ten in 2013), now number six. Birds which have dropped out of the Top Ten include greenfinch and chaffinch, due to finch trichomonosis, and starling, due to habitat loss.

Garden BirdWatch is supported around the country by a network of local Ambassadors. These volunteers, who take part in the survey themselves, also help to promote it in their local communities. They are available to deliver talks, attend events or write pieces for local publications. If you would like to contact them, please email gbw@bto.org with details.

If you would like to find out more about Garden BirdWatch, including how to sign up to our weekly newsletter, please click www.bto.org/gbw or scan the QR code.

With a thematic issue on a vital topic - the rise child poverty, ending on a hopeful note. You will find sharp analyses on the effect of poverty on children's lives, with a spotlight on the communities that are on the front line of deprivation, with personal stories and shared solutions. Click on the image to gain access to it, or find us on Substack.

Journalism by the people, for the people.

The post More than a hobby: garden birdwatching is the new conservation frontier first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

In January 1962, three girls at a mission boarding school in Kashasha, Tanganyika, started laughing. They couldn't stop. Within weeks, 95 of the school's 159 students were incapacitated by fits of laughter that lasted hours or even days. The school closed. — Read the rest

The post In 1962, a laughing fit spread through Tanzania for 18 months appeared first on Boing Boing.

Everybody dreads the chores of maintenance; Stewart Brand is trying to make maintenance cool. In his new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Brand celebrates the value, methods, even the joy of maintaining things - from cars to homes to bodies - in a series of stories, digressions, lessons, and brilliant insights. Turns out civilization is basically varieties of maintenance. Stewart Brand's books famously change people's minds, and this one changed my mind. I now look forward to my maintenance duties, and I learned some how to do it better from this book. — KK

When a 65-year-old oak tree died from fungal disease, artist Steve Parker carved slices of its trunk like vinyl records, etching bird songs into the wood grain. These playable oak records are featured in a 3-minute video where you can hear the sounds of the birds that once lived in the tree's branches. Parker also created a brass sculpture with medical ventilators that splays out like tree roots—a reference to his father's battle with cancer. "Funeral for a Tree" is a beautiful meditation on grief that inspires me to find ways to transform what's been lost into something that still speaks—or sings. — CD

My AirPods Pro started making a loud hissing noise. I tried all the different fixes the online hive mind had to offer, to no avail. They were out of warranty, and I didn't want to spend $250 to replace them. Instead, I bought a pair of CMF Wireless Earbuds for 1/10th the price. To my ears, they sound just as good as the AirPods Pro with excellent noise cancellation and easy pairing with all of my Apple hardware. I use them for phone calls, listening to podcasts, and music. I bought the orange ones so they'd be easy to find when I drop them on the floor of a plane. — MF

One of my go-to podcasts these days is the non-fiction scripted show Articles of Interest, which investigates articles of clothing and other things that we wear. It is a spin-off from the legendary podcast 99% Invisible, and carries that program's intelligence and the nerdy appeal of deep research. Now in its second season, each episode tackles the origin, history, and meaning of an article such as blue jeans, suits, wedding dresses, and even pockets! Illuminating worlds within small details is what this show is so good at. Recommended. — KK

Rather than adding resolutions and goals to your new year, this article suggests 12 distractions you can leave behind — like scrolling for stress relief, push notifications for most apps, and constant background noise. When they're listed like this, I can immediately see how leaving them behind would create more silence and space in my life, since a lot of these things seem to be the default settings for daily life. — CD

Did you know that Recomendo isn't the only newsletter we publish? We have eight others!

• Gar's Tips & Tools Useful ideas for home and workshop. (Weekly)
• Nomadico News, tips, and tools for working travelers. (Weekly)
• What's in my NOW? In each issue, a person shares things and ideas that are important to them. (Weekly)
• Tools for Possibilities Curated, thematic picks from 20+ years of Cool Tools. (Weekly)
• Books That Belong On Paper Recommendations of visually striking books, with sample pages. (Weekly)
• Book Freak Each issue presents the core concepts from a selected self-improvement book. (Weekly)
• Recomendo Deals 5-10 items previously featured in Cool Tools and Recomendo that are on sale now. (Daily)
• Cool Tools All of our newsletters (besides Recomendo Deals) bundled in one issue. For true fans only! (Weekly)

In our humble opinion, they are all worth trying out, and they're all free. — MF

Sign up here to get Recomendo a week early in your inbox.

Want to feel cosmically insignificant? Wikipedia's "Timeline of the far future" catalogs scientific predictions stretching from the year 3001 to incomprehensibly distant timescales — 10^106 years and beyond.

Some highlights from the itinerary: In about 10,000 years, the red supergiant Antares will go supernova, visible in daylight from Earth. — Read the rest

The post Earth falls into the Sun in 7.59 billion years, and it gets worse from there appeared first on Boing Boing.

Wikipedia has thousands of list articles. Some of those lists catalog other lists. And one article, "List of lists of lists," catalogs the lists of lists. It's exactly as recursive as it sounds: the page includes itself in its own index. — Read the rest

The post Wikipedia's "List of lists of lists" contains itself appeared first on Boing Boing.

You've seen it in exam booklets, government forms, and technical manuals: a page that says "This page intentionally left blank." But the moment those words appear, the page is no longer blank. It's a small paradox, like a Cretan declaring all Cretans to be liars. — Read the rest

The post "This page intentionally left blank" has a 500-year history appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1986, Italian authorities built a fortified bunker inside a Palermo prison to hold the largest mafia trial in history. Among the 471 defendants rattling their cages was the entire leadership of the Sicilian Mob. In the press gallery sat Leonardo Sciascia, a novelist whose detective stories had done more to expose the mafia's reality than any official effort. — Read the rest

The post A new biography of the novelist who exposed the Sicilian mafia appeared first on Boing Boing.

New York Rep. Tom Suozzi was one of a handful of House Democrats who voted for the DHS funding bill that expanded ICE's budget. Walter Masterson, the comedian and political activist best known for turning MAGA talking points against themselves, decided to pay him a visit and explain how his constituents really feel. — Read the rest

The post Comedian Walter Masterson gives diaper to ICE-supporting Democratic congressman appeared first on Boing Boing.

A mistakenly updated PlayStation Store listing suggests the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Warhorse's sprawling, mind-boggingly deep historical RPG, is getting a next-gen upgrade. Eagle-eyed Reddit users spotted the altered page before it was reverted. It read:

"The PS5 version of Kingdom Come: Deliverance now features graphical updates including 4K resolution, improved framerate, high-resolution textures and many more.

— Read the rest

The post "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" may get a surprise PS5 remaster appeared first on Boing Boing.

We've gotten plenty of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies recently, including one that made a certain sect of culture warriors really, really mad, but how many have featured John Wick-style fight choreography? Not enough.

Indie animator John Likens has filled the gap. — Read the rest

The post Fan-made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles test footage is really cool appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you ever find yourself in need of a poem, I've got great news for you: Dial-A-Poem is back! These days, the arts of all kinds, including protest music, are providing much-appreciated balms for our collective wounds and voices for our collective outrage, so Dial-A-Poem's return couldn't have been better timed. — Read the rest

The post Dial-A-Poem is back, with the revolutionary poetry we all need right now appeared first on Boing Boing.

We now have yet another reason to love Dr. Bronner's soap company, home of the "Original All-One Magic Soap" and much more — the family-owned company is now a Certified Living Wage employer. The company explains that being Living Wage Certified this means that "every member of our staff earns a wage that ensures a decent quality of life, not just the minimum it takes to survive."  — Read the rest

The post Yet another reason to love Dr. Bronner's soap company: They're now Living Wage Certified! appeared first on Boing Boing.

The only ice I ever want to witness is the ice being obliterated by Levi, an extraordinary goat who lives at "No Regrets Farm" in Monroe, Oregon, and was the winner of "Jenny's Top Animal Video of 2025." That winning video featured Levi enjoying a mind-blowingly long slurp of water that still leaves me stunned every time I see it. — Read the rest

The post Watch an extraordinary goat absolutely obliterating ice appeared first on Boing Boing.

Email isn't an obvious business benefit. Imagine it is the early 1980s and you need to communicate with people across the country. A first-class letter will cost you 17p - about 60p in today's money. The letter will be delivered the next day and you'll have your answer back the day after.

By contrast, a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that's before you take into account message transmission costs. That's roughly the same price as sending over 8,000 letters. Is that a sensible investment for the 1980's businessman?

In 1986, British Telecom started producing "The Communications Programme" which was "a new video magazine produced exclusively for the top communications people in the UK's largest organisations".

The show was distributed on video-tape and the archived shows are genuinely fascinating. They're a mixture of business reporting, thinly veiled advertorials, and a glance at the future of digital services.

Buried in the middle of episode 4 is this advert from the Department of Trade and Industry.

There's very little online information about the "Vanguard Project" - it was a VADS initiative (Value Added Data Services) run by DTI, BT, IBM, INS, ISTEL, and FASTRAK. Some of those acronyms survive, some don't!

Its aim was to promote awareness of EDI and its potential for the United Kingdom.

In 1986 the Department of Trade and Industry launched a project called Vanguard to promote the development of this kind of service in 10 different sectors including construction, educational supplies and wholesale food distribution. The major VADS suppliers (BT, IBM, INS, Istel and the Midland Bank) in the UK were heavily involved in the project from the beginning.

Information Sources in Information Technology

What's "EDI"?

Electronic Data Interchange.

A means of transferring data between co-operating enterprises without having to print it out on one computer and key it into another. Requires agreement about standards (proprietary or otherwise).

Did it work? Well, that's hard to say!

There's a paper from 1989 called Survey of Electronic Data Interchange Users and Service Providers in the UK. It dives into the then current challenges of getting British businesses to adopt EDI.

It quotes Sir John Harvey-Jones saying that most people running companies were:

…old people like me not familiar with the technological possibilities! We have great difficulty in making imaginative jumps to see the way in which the whole of our business can be reorganised, revitalised, set up in totally new ways, releasing energy and cost and putting us into the pole position. I can see abundant evidence that the full benefits of EDI will only be reaped by the companies where the Chief Executives is seized with enthusiasm for the potential prize he can grasp.

Which still seems true today! Although over-enthusiasm has led us to a weird AI-in-everything future.

The paper doesn't talk about Vanguard specifically, although it does have this rather cute diagram adapted from one of its reports:

Not quite the Gartner Hype Cycle!

The paper concludes that:

Unfortunately the zealots of EDI tend to be unable to 'sell' the benefits to management in most companies, and this is not helped by the way that many companies have been forced to trade electronically. Management tends to think that EDI is about computers, and because they think that computers are technical they abdicate responsibility with the cry of 'its all too difficult'. This must be wrong. It is up to those who understand EDI to learn how to talk to management, and it is up to management to understand that not only is EDI not about technology, but even if it was it is still their responsibility.

Again, true as it ever was!

Nestled in the bibliography is this tantalising list of publications from the now-defunct Her Majesty's Stationery Office:

None of which appear to be online, although a few are in The British Library - and a few more available on Google Books

The state awarded several contracts for Vanguard - most of which seemed to be in the training space. Here's what The EDI handbook said about it:

(My thanks to Don Thompson, Owen Boswarva, and Ms7821 for digging out some of those references.)

Did it work? By the time I entered the workforce in the 1990s, it seemed like every desk had a computer. Although the Internet was in its infancy, email and electronic ordering was a normal part of business. The various proto-Internet protocols were still around, but were quickly being replaced.

A thesis published in 1991 asked an important question:

why should a non-interventionist Government as Thatchers become directly involved in developing the market and working together with private companies whose normal aim is to increase market share at the expense of their competitors rather, than cooperate with them?

The impact of Electronic data interchange on Irish foreign trade and transport

Metcalfe's Law tells us that there is no value being the only business on a network. It simply isn't rational to invest in connecting to a data service that no-one else is on. But the value of that network increases as more people and businesses get connected. If you've read The Entrepreneurial State, you'll know that governments are often responsible for subsidising technological initiatives like this. The state, its citizenry, and its businesses all benefit from the increased efficiencies of electronic communications, so it is only right that the state should bootstrap these sorts of projects.

I sent an FoI request to find out more but it looks like all the information is now archived.

If you know of any other sources of information about Project Vanguard - please leave a comment.