It’s perhaps only fitting that the digital artist was Queer—oh, and that he also developed the first computer-generated love letter. Enter Christopher Strachey, a British computer scientist best known for his pioneering work in programming language design and formal methods in computing.
Christopher Strachey was born on November 16, 1916, in Hampstead, England, to Oliver Strachey, a cryptographer who worked on codebreaking during both World Wars, and Rachel (Ray) Costelloe, a women’s suffrage activist. So yes, Strachey was raised in an intellectually formidable household.
While relatively little is known about his childhood, it’s clear he displayed early brilliance but struggled academically. Eventually, he landed at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1935, initially studying mathematics before switching to physics. However, the academic pressure took a toll, and by the end of his third year, Strachey suffered a nervous breakdown—something his sister, the writer Barbara Strachey, later linked to his struggle with his sexuality.
Returning to King’s in October 1938 for a final year, he graduated with a "lower second" in the Natural Sciences Tripos. This limited his options for research positions, so he accepted a job as a physicist at Standard Telephones and Cables Limited (STC), where he worked on mathematical analysis for designing electron tubes used in radar. This required complex calculations that demanded the use of a differential analyzer—a computing machine that piqued Strachey’s interest and set him on his path toward programming.
By 1945, he was teaching at St. Edmund's and, in his free time, teaching himself to play the bassoon. Then in 1949, he moved on to teach at the prestigious Harrow School, where he dabbled in writing code. Here, he developed what can arguably be considered the first computer game—a draughts-playing program for the Pilot ACE computer. He chose draughts as a middle ground between tic-tac-toe (too simple) and chess (too complex for computers at the time). Unfortunately, the game immediately maxed out the machine’s memory.
But Strachey didn’t stop there. Enter Alan Turing—who, at the time, was the assistant director of the Manchester University Computing Machine Laboratory. When Strachey told Turing about his draughts program, Turing encouraged him to refine it. Strachey then translated his program for the Ferranti Mark I, optimizing it so the game ran efficiently without tanking the computer’s memory.
By 1951, Strachey had garnered a reputation and was hired as a technical officer at the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC). While there, he made a number of innovations—including, casually, the first computer-generated music. Using the Ferranti Mark I, he programmed short extracts of three pieces—"God Save the King," "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," and "In the Mood"—which were recorded by a BBC crew. In 2016, researchers at the University of Canterbury restored these recordings.
And because Strachey was a romantic at heart, he also created the first computer-generated love letter. Using a 70-word vocabulary and a simple syntactic template (“YOU ARE MY [adjective] [noun]. MY [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verbs] YOUR [adjective] [noun].”), the Ferranti Mark I could generate endless variations of sentimental nonsense. Every letter was signed “M.U.C.,” for the Manchester University Computer. And they say romance is dead.
By 1959, Strachey left NRDC to become a freelance computer consultant, working with organizations like NRDC, EMI, and Ferranti on various projects, including programming languages and logic design. He hired Peter Landin as his assistant—Landin would later become a foundational figure in programming language theory.
That same year, Strachey developed the concept of time-sharing—essentially, a way for multiple users to interact with a computer simultaneously, rather than waiting their turn like some kind of digital breadline. He presented his paper Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers at the 1959 UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris, where he introduced the concept to J. C. R. Licklider. MIT’s Computation Center later credited this paper as "the first on time-shared computers."
In 1962, he joined the University of Cambridge while continuing his consulting work. By 1965, he became the first Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and founded the Programming Research Group. There, he collaborated with Dana Scott, a mathematician and computer scientist known for his work in domain theory and formal semantics.
For his pioneering contributions to computer science, Strachey was named a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1971.
Christopher Strachey passed away on May 18, 1975, at just 58 years old. But his legacy remains: from programming languages to computer-generated music, from love letters to the very concept of time-sharing, Strachey’s fingerprints are all over modern computing. Without him, who knows what computer games, love letters, or SoundCloud would look like today. Without him who knows what computer games, love letters, or Soundlcoud would look like today.
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