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 having been given the chance to use first the National Physical Laboratories’ ACE computer and then the Manchester Mark 1: two of the earliest working computers in the world. The range of things he achieved is amazing. He probably created the first computer game, the first recorded computer music, the first “creative” program and that was just when he was playing. He became an early computer consultant and later led the Oxford University Programming Research Group. He invented the idea of time-sharing computers, develop the CPL language (the ancestor of C and so many modern programming languages, so has had a powerful effect on all subsequent programming language design. Perhaps most notably, with Dana Scott he pioneered the idea of using maths to describe the meaning of programming languages, called denotational semantics. Oh, and he was famously a wizard debugger too.

He achieved all of this despite poor performance at school and university when younger, and despite suffering a nervous breakdown when at university that interrupted his studies. It has been suggested that the breakdown might have been due to him coming to terms with the fact that he was homosexual: homosexuality was illegal at the time in the UK.

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