Christopher Strachey | i |
 
last name: Strachey
first name: Christopher
birthday: 1916
birth-place: Hampstead (England)
death date: 1975
Summary

Phycist Christopher Strachey programmed a computer (Mark 1 of Ferranti electrical installation company) at the university of Manchester (England) to produce literary texts, and wrote with it the first literary programme in the history of technology – it wrote love letters. In 1954 Strachey published the draft of the programmes and two of his creations in the english cultural magazine Encounter .

A simulation of Strachey’s “Loveletters” program from 1952 in its original form, developed by artists/theorist Link, David can be viewed here > Variantology 2: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies.

Biography

1935 Admitted to King’s College, Cambridge , studied mathematics and then transferred to physics.
1940 Joined Standard Telephone & Cables Ltd (STC) as a research physicist providing mathematical analysis for the design of electron tubes used in radar.
1946 Worked as a schoolmaster at St Edmund’s School, Canterbury, teaching mathematics and physics.
1949 Taught at Harrow School for three years.
1951 Worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) , developed a program for the game of draughts on Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) in spare time and then on the Manchester Mark 1, with a much bigger memory. He also wrote one of the first computer music programs, which played Baa Baa Black Sheep.^
1952 to 1959 Worked for the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) and was exposed to several computer centers in the United States while cataloguing their instruction sets. He also worked on programming both the Elliott 401 computer and the Ferranti Pegasus computer, the analysis of vibration in aircraft and developed the concept of time-sharing.
1959 Worked as a consultant for NRDC, EMI, Ferranti and other organizations involved with logical design for computers and designing high-level programming languages.
1965 First Director of the Programming Research Group at Oxford University where he collaborated with Dana Scott.
Works
Christopher Strachey
Love letters
1954
References
Illustrations
strachey
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