In 1952 Christopher Strachey, then a schoolteacher and an early computing enthusiast who would go on to become a major figure in programming language theory, wrote one of the most charming early programs in computing history. Running on the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester - the commercial machine descended from the Manchester Baby - his program generated love letters. It worked from a simple template, something like “You are my [adjective] [noun]. My [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] your [adjective] [noun],” and filled each slot by randomly selecting from word lists, using the machine’s hardware random-number source.
The output was tender and slightly absurd, with lines such as “You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish.” Each letter was signed “M.U.C.,” for Manchester University Computer, as if the machine itself were the lovestruck author. Strachey and his friend Alan Turing found the results delightful; more buttoned-up colleagues thought the whole thing a frivolous waste of an expensive computer. Scholars have since read the gender-neutral, oddly formal letters as a quiet, coded gesture in an era when Strachey’s and Turing’s sexuality was criminalized.
The love letter generator is now regarded as one of the first works of computer-generated literature and a founding piece of generative art - a machine producing creative text by recombining fragments at random. It predates ELIZA by more than a decade and rhymes, across seventy years, with today’s language models: a computer assembling human-sounding prose from pieces, and an audience charmed and unsettled by the result.