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also created the first moving digital images ever to appear on a computer screen, in June 1948:
rhythmically changing patterns of pixels on the Baby’s screen represented—or pictured—the
changing contents of the computer’s memory as the program ran. These images, flickering
across the tiny glass-and-phosphor screen, were the first step toward today’s digital movies and
computer-generated animations as well as the images on the screens of our phones and tablets.
You can watch a recreation of these images at tinyurl.com/first-moving-digital-images.^87
Turing and Strachey were both interested in the computer’s capacity to process words as well
as numbers. Strachey went so far as to design a program that wrote love letters. The steamy
notes were signed ‘M. U. C.’ (for ‘Manchester University computer’). Strachey used program-
ming tricks that he described as ‘almost childishly simple’ (and to him they probably were): he
made up some recipes for building sentences and stored the recipes in the computer’s memory,
together with lists of words and expressions that he culled from Roget’s Thesaurus.^88 The pro-
gram would follow one or another recipe step by step, including steps like ‘Here choose a word
from list so-and-so’. The program made its selections using the random number generator that
Turing had designed, a kind of electronic roulette wheel (see Chapter 39).^89 The computer’s
letters were eerily alien:^90
DARLING SWEETHEART
YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR
PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL
SYMPATHY: MY TENDER LIKING.
YOURS BEAUTIFULLY
M. U. C.
HONEY DEAR
MY SYMPATHETIC AFFECTION BEAUTIFULLY ATTRACTS YOUR AFFECTIONATE
ENTHUSIASM. YOU ARE MY LOVING ADORATION: MY BREATHLESS ADORATION. MY
FELLOW FEELING BREATHLESSLY HOPES FOR YOUR DEAR EAGERNESS. MY LOVESICK
figure 20.2 The Manchester computer playing draughts (checkers). Strachey’s hand-drawn diagram explains the
symbols on the screen. The computer is Black.
Reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Library and Camphill Village Trust.