(22-04-2020, 11:05 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm quite impressed by how much information the intelligence community's Study Group was able to gather about the VMS, especially considering that many places were closed during wartime, travel was greatly restricted, and many treasures (like manuscripts) were hidden away until things settled down.
What was (largely) the same then and now is that the people who knew their business also knew each other. They communicated and exchanged information, but of course at a much slower rate than is possible now.
What could not exist in the pre-internet days is networks of amateurs that would study a topic outside their area of expertise.
The knowledge about the Voynich MS in the times of Friedman was still very superficial.
D'Imperio in the 1970's seems to have been the first to study the 'history of the history'. At this time, the century in which the MS was produced was still much debated, and no new information on top of Voynich's 1921 paper had been found. The little bits of useful information that were produced before 1960 came from people like Panofsky and Salomon, exactly the type of people I meant in my first paragraph above.
Other people from that group were (with hindsight) unfortunately quite wrong.