Manchester Mark I - Loveletters

I know I'm quite late (or early) for a St. Valentine article but I just got late and really can't wait until the 2010 cupid.
I just wanna share with you this curious piece of history of the information technology.

The Manchester Mark I, also nicknamed "The Baby" is known to be one of the earliest electronic computers and, as the name suggests, it was developed by the University of Manchester, UK, starting from August 1948.
The Mark I is also famous because from its academic environment it spawned the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer, the Ferranti Mark I.
Programming one of these illustrious ancestors was tricky. They had no defined assembly language and the instructions had to be submitted in binary code. On one intermediary version of the machine, the programmer had to manipulate switches to input programs. The output device consisted in a CRT (cathode ray tube) "screen" displaying a series of dots.
From August 1953 to May 1954 strange love letters began to appear on the the notice board of Manchester University's Computer Department. Something similar to the following example.

HONEY LOVE
YOU ARE MY DEAR PASSION: MY ADORABLE FERVOUR: MY ARDENT INFATUATION: MY ARDENT DEVOTION. MY PASSIONATE LUST BREATHLESSLY HOPES FOR YOUR LIKING. 
YOURS BURNINGLY
M. U. C.


All these letters were signed M.U.C. and I bet they were quite a chat facilitator for the campus people which did spot them, day after day, on the notice board. Remember that we were in the fifties and certain expressions of love and passion were maybe far too frank for the taste of the well bred people of the time. I can imagine the surprise when those people discovered that those proofs of feelings came from the "mind" of a machine. As a matter of fact "M.U.C." stood for "Manchester University Computer", and the love letters originated from a programme designed and written by Christopher Strachey (1916-1975), one of the researcher on the Manchester machine. Exploiting the built-in random generator of the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercial computer in history, he managed to generate texts with a purpose.
Years before, on 1949, the Manchester Mark 1 -an early academic-only computer- had successfully run a programme to search for Mersenne primes. The announcement of the success of this task caught the interest of the British press which widely reported the event using the sentence "electronic brain". This description on its turn generated a discontent in the Manchester University's Department of Neurosurgery. Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, of neurosurgery at Manchester University, expressed on the following terms when relating about the subject:

Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No machine could feel pleasure at its success, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or miserable when it cannot get what it wants.

I don't know if Strachey took inspiration to this debate for writing his programme, but true is that his intent was to show that the computer could be set up to produce artifacts which could arouse emotions into those who interacted with its output. Maybe it's also worth remembering that Manchester University's Computer Department was also the work place of Alan Turing (1912 - 1954), the father of modern computer science and one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. In 1950 Turing created the so called Turing Test with the purpose of being a reference upon which testing the ability of a machine to "disguise" itself as a human.
By the way, fast forwarding the years until nowadays, Mr. David Link created a Manchester Mark I web-emulator which runs the loveletter program by Christopher Strachey. You can access the page here.



Here's a list of resources on the subject.

• http://www.alpha60.de/research/muc/
• http://www.digital60.org/
• http://www.digital60.org/media/mark_one_digital_music/
• http://www.digital60.org/media/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1
• Alan Turing's Programmers' Handbook for the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II (Manchester, 1951) (http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/32 and transcribed athttp://www.computer50.org/kgill/mark1/progman.html)
• The Turing Archive for the History of Computing http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/index/archiveindex.html

Pictures and media are Copyright of David Link and The University of Manchester. They are here reproduced under the terms of the Fair Use.