Recompiling History: Code Heritage as a Site for Recovering Marginalized Computing Histories

This paper argues that source code constitutes a legitimate primary source for historical inquiry, capable of revealing social, cultural, and personal dimensions of computing history invisible through conventional archival materials. Drawing on Critical Code Studies as developed by Mark C. Marino—which applies critical hermeneutics to computer code within its socio-historical context—and situating the analysis within the institutional frameworks established by the 2003 UNESCO Charter on Digital Heritage and Software Heritage's preservation initiatives, this research demonstrates how preserved code can serve as testimony to experiences that dominant narratives have marginalised.
The central case study examines Christopher Strachey's Love Letter Algorithm (1952), the first work of computer-generated literature, written while Strachey collaborated with Alan Turing at Manchester. Close reading of the preserved source code at the Bodleian Library reveals a deliberately gender-neutral structure—no gendered pronouns, the computer signing as author—a significant choice in 1952 Britain where homosexuality remained criminalised and love letters between men could constitute criminal evidence. Original archival research uncovered drafts of a second, abandoned algorithm containing explicitly gendered references ("that man," "your mother"), abandoned precisely at the moment of Turing's arrest and conviction for gross indecency, and never completed after his death in 1954. This temporal correlation and linguistic shift provide material evidence of how state persecution shaped and curtailed creative collaboration in early computing, demonstrating that source code, contextualised within its conditions of production, preserves traces of lived experience that conventional documentation obscures.