Play script at Sharon’s fingertips (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Play script at Sharon’s fingertips

8:56am Friday 19th June 2009 in

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Occasionally, when trawling through our archives, we come up with a picture that we just have to share with you. This is one of them.

It appeared in the Telegraph & Argus in September, 1970, and doesn’t it just show? What unreconstructed days they were; looking at the young lady in the picture, you would imagine she was merely window dressing for whatever that big construction of dials and switches is.

Not a bit of it. Sharon Whittaker, 21, was at the time a student at Bradford University, who had gained a BSc degree in mathematics and statistics.

Not that you’d know it from the focus on her legs, mini skirt and flip-flops in our picture… Sharon was actually involved in a quite intriguing project, involving what the report called “her agile box of tricks” – that thing she’s sitting on is a computer. Agile? Imagine if the reporters from 1970 could have seen an iPhone or a Nintendo DS!

Sharon – and this was in September, so it is not an April Fool – was apparently working on programming her computer so that she could, in the words of the report, “feed the machine with blocks of random words, complete phrases, stage directions or whatever.”

The reason? So that the computer could write a play.

We’ve no idea if Sharon succeeded, but we’d love to find out. She’d be 60 now, or thereabouts, and it would be wonderful if anyone who knows her could let us know whether she managed to get a literary work out of that monster machine.

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