The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee's early programming career

This is a superb piece of research, and odd that nobody has pulled this material before.

The Atlas 2 is obviously the successor to the Atlas, which Turing worked on before "The Baby" at Manchester University booted up, at which point he quit and moved to Manchester to work on that.

I seem to recall his early programs for The Baby - and his planned use of the Atlas - was to model "morphogens", his theory of how animals got their strips, spots and other markings. I think it was at the Science Museum in London (worth a trip for computer historians anyway to see Babbage's Analytical Engine, built in xxxx, next to a jar containing Babbage's actual brain), where there was a collection of printouts showing spots like on a Friesian cow (the most common breed of dairy cows in England).

I find this diving back into early uses of computing for creative and scientific purposes fascinating - it's like people were just so excited about being able to do interesting things, they just dived in with the tool that they had.

The poetry of Coetzee's program in this article is interesting - it's better, arguably, than you'd get from an LLM today. It's mildly mysterious, grating, intriguing but uncomfortable. A little like the things I remember of Coetzee's actual later writing (which I've not read much of, TBH).