Christopher Strachey

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Christopher Strachey
St Edmund's School, Canterbury
Harrow School
Doctoral studentsPeter Mosses
David Turner

Christopher S. Strachey (/ˈstreɪtʃi/; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist.[1][2][3] He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.[4] He has also been credited as possibly being the first developer of a video game.[5] He was a member of the Strachey family, prominent in government, arts, administration, and academia.

Early life and education

Christopher Strachey was born on 16 November 1916 to

Natural Sciences Tripos.[6]

Career

Unable to continue his education, Christopher joined

St Edmund's School, Canterbury, teaching mathematics and physics. Three years later he was able to move to the more prestigious Harrow School
in 1949, where he stayed for three years.

Christopher Strachey's Draughts 1952 photo evidence of the first video game
Draughts on a storage CRT, 1952

In January 1951, a friend introduced him to

operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. By the summer of 1952, the program could "play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed".[8][9] While he did not give this game – which may have been the first video game – a name, Noah Wardrip-Fruin named it "M. U. C. Draughts."[10]

Strachey programmed the first Computer music in England – the earliest recording of music played by a computer: a rendition of the British National Anthem "God Save the King" on the University of Manchester's Ferranti Mark 1 computer, in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: "God Save the King", "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and "In the Mood". Researchers at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch restored the acetate master disc in 2016 and the results may be heard on SoundCloud.[11][12]

During the summer of 1952, Strachey programmed a love letter generator for the Ferranti Mark 1 that is known as the first example of computer-generated literature.[13]

In May 1952, Strachey gave a two-part talk on "the study of control in animals and machines" ("cybernetics") for the BBC Home Service's Science Survey programme.[14][15]

Strachey worked for the

Ferranti Pegasus computer. Together with Donald B. Gillies, he filed three patents in computing design including the design of base registers for program relocation. He also worked on the analysis of vibration in aircraft, working briefly with Roger Penrose
.

In 1959, Strachey left NRDC to become a computer consultant working for NRDC,

high-level programming languages. For a contract to produce the autocode for the Ferranti Orion computer, Strachey hired Peter Landin
who became his one assistant for the duration of Strachey's consulting period.

Strachey developed the concept of time-sharing in 1959.[16][17] He filed a patent application in February that year and gave a paper "Time Sharing in Large Fast Computers" at the inaugural UNESCO Information Processing Conference in Paris where he passed the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider.[18][19] This paper is credited by the MIT Computation Center in 1963 as "the first paper on time-shared computers".[4]

In 1962, while remaining a consultant, he accepted a position at the University of Cambridge.

In 1965, Strachey accepted a position at the University of Oxford as the first director of the Programming Research Group and later the university's first professor of computer science and fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He collaborated with Dana Scott.

Strachey was elected as a distinguished fellow of the British Computer Society in 1971 for his pioneering work in computer science.

In 1973, Strachey (along with Robert Milne) began to write an essay submitted to the Adams Prize competition, after which they continued work to revising it into book form. Strachey can be seen and heard in the recorded Lighthill debate on AI[20] (see Lighthill report).

Strachey contracted an illness diagnosed as jaundice which, after a period of seeming recovery, returned and he died of infectious hepatitis on 18 May 1975.[21]

He developed the

Combined Programming Language (CPL). His influential set of lecture notes Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages formalised the distinction between L- and R- values (as seen in the C programming language). Strachey also coined the term currying,[citation needed
] although he did not invent the underlying concept.

He was instrumental in the design of the Ferranti Pegasus computer.

He was a pioneer of early video games creating a version of

draughts for the Ferranti Mark 1
.

The macro language

macro expansion languages.[22]

After his untimely death in 1975, Strachey was succeeded by Sir Tony Hoare as Head of the Programming Research Group at Oxford, starting in 1977.

Legacy

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford has a Christopher Strachey Professorship of Computing,[23][24] which has been held by the following:

In November 2016, a Strachey 100 event was held at Oxford University to celebrate the centenary of Strachey's birth,[27] including a viewing at the Weston Library in Oxford of the Christopher Strachey archive held in the Bodleian Library collection.[28]

Publications

References

  1. ^ Christopher Strachey: British computer scientist, Encyclopædia Britannica.
  2. ^ Catalogue of the papers and correspondence of Christopher Strachey (1916–1975), The National Archives, United Kingdom.
  3. ISSN 1388-3690. (PostScript version Archived 13 March 2017 at the Wayback Machine
    .)
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-0-262-03008-3
    . "the first paper on time-shared computers by C. Strachey at the June 1959 UNESCO Information Processing conference"
  5. ^ Brown, Stuart (4 October 2019). "The First Video Game". YouTube. Archived from the original on 4 October 2019. Retrieved 19 January 2022.
  6. S2CID 17188378
    .
  7. ^ "The Priesthood at Play: Computer Games in the 1950s". They Create Worlds. 22 January 2014. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  8. ^ "What is Artificial Intelligence". AlanTuring.net. May 2000. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  9. doi:10.1145/800259.808992
    .
  10. ISBN 9780262044653
    .
  11. ^ "First recording of computer-generated music – created by Alan Turing – restored". The Guardian. 26 September 2016. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  12. ^ "Restoring the first recording of computer music – Sound and vision blog". British Library. 13 September 2016. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  13. doi:10.7273/1XSG-NV26
    .
  14. ^ "Science Survey – BBC Home Service Basic – 1 May 1952 – BBC Genome". BBC. May 1952. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  15. ^ "Science Survey – BBC Home Service Basic – 8 May 1952 – BBC Genome". BBC. 8 May 1952. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  16. ^ "Computer Pioneers – Christopher Strachey". history.computer.org. Retrieved 23 January 2020. What Strachey proposed in his concept of time-sharing was an arrangement that would preserve the direct contact between programmer and machine, while still achieving the economy of multiprogramming.
  17. ^ "Computer – Time-sharing and minicomputers". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 23 January 2020. In 1959 Christopher Strachey in the United Kingdom and John McCarthy in the United States independently described something they called time-sharing.
  18. ISBN 978-0-19-286207-5
    .
  19. ^ "Reminiscences on the Theory of Time-Sharing". jmc.stanford.edu. Retrieved 23 January 2020. in 1960 'time-sharing' as a phrase was much in the air. It was, however, generally used in my sense rather than in John McCarthy's sense of a CTSS-like object.
  20. ^ bilkable (12 September 2010), The Lighthill Debate (1973) – part 6 of 6, retrieved 27 October 2017
  21. ^ "Computer Pioneers – Christopher Strachey".
  22. ^ C. Strachey: "A General Purpose Macrogenerator", The Computer Journal, 8(3):225–241, 1965.
  23. ^ a b "Christopher Strachey Professorship of Computing". Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. 5 November 2021. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  24. ^ "Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing". University of Oxford. 28 October 2021. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  25. ^ "Samson Abramsky". UK: Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. Retrieved 18 January 2017.
  26. ^ "Welcome to our new Strachey Chair, Professor Nobuko Yoshida". Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. 29 June 2022. Retrieved 18 January 2024.
  27. ^ "Strachey 100: Celebrating the life and research of Christopher Strachey". UK: Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. 2016. Retrieved 18 January 2017.
  28. FACS FACTS. 2. UK: BCS-FACS: 44–52. Retrieved 18 January 2017. (Also here
    .)

Further reading

External links
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