Christopher Strachey

The first computer wizard

With father a cryptographer, mother a suffragist, Christopher Strachey was a school teacher when he first started ‘playing’ with computers in the early 1950s. He went on to be a Computer Science Great.

He achieved this despite poor performance at school and university when younger, and despite suffering a nervous breakdown when at university.

He was responsible for fun firsts but also for putting program language design on a solid footing in ways that still help modern programmers.

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The first computer wizard

Christopher Strachey did a series of firsts in computer programming, and that was just when he was playing… (read on)

The algorithm that could not speak its name

The first program that was actually creative was probably written by Christopher Strachey, in 1952. It wrote love letters…possibly gay ones… (read on).

The secret of being a Wizard Debugger

Target on bug in code

Elite computer programmers are often called wizards, and one of the first wizards was Christopher Strachey, He gained a reputation as being a “perfect” programmer and an amazing debugger. So what was his secret?… (read on).

The first recorded computer music

The first recorded music by a computer program was the result of a flamboyant flourish added on the end of a program that played draughts in the early 1950s. Written by Strachey, it played God Save the King… (read on).

Hallucinating chatbots

Postcards in a display stand

We use an unplugged version of Strachey’s love letter writing algorithm applied to writing postcards to explain why chatbots make things up… (read on).

Program a postcard

Here is our activity page around Strachey’s love letter writing program… (read on).

Find our activities and resources based on Strachey’s Love Letter Writing program on Teaching London Computing.

More to come …

This page was funded by UKRI, through grant EP/W033615/1.