London, Mar 11 : The first task for the world's earliest computer - the Manchester-built Mark One - was to compose romantic verse.
After creating the Mark One's small-scale prototype, the Baby Computer, in 1948, Manchester University scientists earned world-wide fame.
Then dozens of pioneer software programs were specially written, only to be lost over time.
But German academic David Ward has turned up a light-hearted love-poetry generator program written by Manchester scientist Christopher Strachey in 1952 to test the machine's ability to randomly select information, reports The Telegraph.