Obviously false. The 386 wasn't available in the "early 80's." Too bad...the rest of the story was plausible; you had me until I noticed that.
(And they didn't stop production until September 2007...yikes!)
He's got three kids. Although he might be a geek, I'd call that evidence he's no longer unicorn-attractant.
I'm also trying to figure out how a solar wind shield (a few keV) would do anything for cosmic ray particles (GeV, anyone?)
I trust the folks at RAL to be doing good work. I think the real news here is in the size of the protected area: magnetic fields deflecting charged particles is hardly new. Their trial is billed as a metre across, whereas the solar wind DeBye length is on the order of 10m. So they're dealing with scales smaller than a typical plasma treatment. I'll have to read the actual article to be sure.
It seems that more and more mathematicians are using a new, high level language named "research student".