Unable to continue his education, Strachey joined
Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) as a research physicist. His first job was providing mathematical analysis for the design of
electron tubes used in
radar. The complexity of the calculations required the use of a
differential analyser. This initial experience with a computing machine sparked Strachey's interest, and he began to research the topic. An application for a research degree at the University of Cambridge was rejected, and Strachey continued to work at STC throughout the
Second World War. After the war, he fulfilled a long-standing ambition by becoming a schoolmaster at
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. In January 1951, a friend introduced him to
Mike Woodger of the
National Physical Laboratory (NPL). The lab had successfully built a reduced version of Alan Turing's
Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) the concept of which dated from 1945: the
Pilot ACE. In his spare time, Strachey developed
a checkers video game in May 1951. This may have been the first video game. The game completely exhausted the Pilot ACE's memory. The draughts program failed due to program errors when it first ran at NPL on 30 July 1951. When Strachey heard about the
Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the
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". While he did not give this game a name,
Noah Wardrip-Fruin named it "M. U. C. Draughts." 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. 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. 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. Strachey worked for the
National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) from 1952 to 1959. While working on the St. Lawrence Seaway project, he was able to visit several computer centres in the United States and catalogue their
instruction sets. Later, he worked on programming both the
Elliott 401 computer and 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,
EMI,
Ferranti, and other organisations on several wide-ranging projects. This work included logical design for computers, providing
autocode and, later, the design of
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. He filed a patent application in February that year and gave a paper entitled "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. This paper is credited by the
MIT Computation Center in 1963 as "the first paper on time-shared computers". 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 revise it into book form. Strachey participated in the 1973 Lighthill debate on
Artificial Intelligence with
John McCarthy and others (see
Lighthill report). 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, although he did not invent the underlying concept. He was instrumental in the design of the
Ferranti Pegasus computer. The macro language
m4 derives much from Strachey's GPM (
General Purpose Macrogenerator), one of the earliest
macro expansion languages. 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. After his death, Strachey was succeeded by Sir
Tony Hoare as Head of the Programming Research Group at Oxford, starting in 1977. ==Legacy==