![]() In this “epic,” terms like entrail, seaborn, drowsy, nude, and casino are combined and recombined in unexpected ways. A more ambitious work, “Hero and Bad Mother in Epic, a poem,” was featured in the first issue of the South African anti-apartheid magazine Staffrider in 1978. “Computer Poem” ended up in the University of Cape Town’s student magazine in 1963. While the outcomes of these experiments did not exactly lead to great poetry, some of them were ultimately published. The programs were written at different levels of abstraction, from machine code to FORTRAN to what is known as “pseudocode”-nonexecutable coding shorthand. As Roach has shown, these experiments spanned more than a decade and several different computing architectures. The output was a series of lines from which he would make hand selections. He developed programs that, once compiled and executed, drew randomly-albeit in a set order-from indexes of words he had created. His personal archives show him trying to write poems using the machines for which he was writing code. The programmer’s interest in literature soon flowed back into his work with computers. Drawing on the language of computation, he declared that this one book was “probably the finest example of literary pure mathematics in English.” It was only The Good Soldier (1915)-with its concision, minimalism, and craft-that stood the test of time. ![]() However, he found the achievement of Ford’s writing to be limited, and thought the later works tailed off in quality. He recounted spending his Saturdays in the Reading Room of the British Museum as well as two evenings a week when the museum closed late. As scholar Rebecca Roach records, the programmer’s work with this operating system was focused on “conceptualizing the design and writing the code that would instruct the computer about which jobs to implement and in what order.” While this work was more interesting, he was still dissatisfied-and worried too about the use of the technology for the British weapons program.Ī reader of modernist literature, he found distraction by working on a masters thesis on Ford Madox Ford. This new technology, designed to allow multiple tasks to be undertaken simultaneously, was vital to using the resources of the machine more efficiently. He soon left IBM to work for rival company ICT, where he joined the team that was developing the “supervisor” for the Atlas 2 computer housed at the University of Cambridge. He was working in his first job at IBM, where he had imagined doing something significant, like “translating symbolic logic and set theory into digital codes.” Instead, he spent monotonous days talking about inventories and outflows. IN THE EARLY 1960s, a South African computer programmer was living miserably in Britain.
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