I do know the history of that block, and have been subscribed to the relevant mail lists for bogon filters since 1998. It has never been a good idea to start using a currently unallocated /8 for internal purposes, when plenty of rfc1918 space exists. 1/8 is not the first block to ever be taken out of the bogons list and actually used. Some of the "newer" /8s that were in the last few handed out to the RIRs also had reachability issues when arin, ripe and APNIC started giving out /14 to /22 sized pieces of space to ISPs, because a number of people out there had stale bogon filters handcoded into their routers. It is mostly fixed now.