Regular readers will recall this desk's earlier finding that the whole of British scholarship descends from a single abstract composed in a 1961 bus queue. The detection industry has now, with characteristic punctuality, caught up. VeriQuill, the software on which half the nation's universities rely to police originality, announced on Tuesday that it had flagged itself, having traced its own source code to an uncredited punch card discovered in a Milton Keynes filing cabinet, dated 1978.
The punch card, engineers concede, appears itself to be derivative of an earlier punch card, which in turn cites nothing. The regress is expected to terminate, as these things always do, somewhere around a stick dragged through Mesopotamian mud by a scribe who never got tenure either.
"We stand fully behind the integrity of our findings," said a company spokesperson, "which we have since discovered were first stood behind in 1983."
Universities responded in the traditional manner, which is to say by suspending everything pending a review conducted by a committee whose terms of reference were lifted from a previous committee. One has seen this software before, of course, running under a different name, on older hardware, to identical effect. History, as ever, declines to take notes, having been unable to establish who first held the pen.
