Comments on: A Gysin & Sommerville Question

By: Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 11:26:19 +0000

Thank you! Scholarly and publication updates: David Pocknee’s site The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin. Permutations, published by DABA in 2022.

By: j

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 06:38:48 +0000

Came across this post whilst trying to answer the same question – it seemed to me unlikely that Ian Sommerville as an undergrad student and in 1960 would have been able to create a computer program. In an interview with G.G. Lemaire published in French (Il y a des poètes partout, Revue d’Ésthétiques, 1975) Gysin says that the poems “were programmed on a Honeywell computer in 1965”. He doesn’t give the model but this seems to confirm that the program at least dates from that year.

By: Dean Irvine

Dean Irvine — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 18:02:19 +0000

Totally agree with your sense of the possibilities. You may be able to pull something from the Gysin archives at Emory. There’s a typescript of “Kick that habit man” (signed, dated 1959) and manuscripts of other “permutations.” Here’s the online finding aid: http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zcnz

By: Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 17:40:05 +0000

I'd seen that note before at some point; I guess what it means is "the following poems, as printed here in this book, were generated on the Honeywell Series 200 model 120."

I can still think of two possibilities:

Maybe the first programs were written during or after 1965 on the Honeywell Series 200 model 120.
Maybe the first permutation programs were done earlier in the 1960s, and not on that machine. It wouldn't contradict that particular note. Sommerville would in that case have reimplemented his earlier programs, from some different platform, himself.

By: Dean Irvine

Dean Irvine — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 17:24:46 +0000

I suspect that the mistaken Honeywell attribution comes from the English-language edition of Burroughs and Gysin’s The Third Mind (1978), where the “Permutations” section is introduced with the following headnote: “Poems printed on Honeywell Series 200 model 120 computer pro-
grammed by Ian Sommerville; 2420 lines of text.” See https://archive.org/stream/W.s.Burroughs-PdfCollection/WilliamSBurroughsBrionGysin-3rdMind

By: Jason Dyer

Jason Dyer — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 15:18:04 +0000

I found a Honeywell 800 manual from 1960 (it is plausibly the actual machine the permutation poems program ran on) and I am nearly 100% positive the Honeywell 200 did not come until after.

I would need more evidence to decide anything, though; it seems like it should be possible to figure out what computer was accessible from Sommerville's location.

By: Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:45:15 +0000

The difficulty is that the original permutation poems, manually created, certainly appeared earlier than the DREAMMACHINE (also a Gysin/Sommerville collaboration), but when the first program was written is still not clear.

I am not certain that the Honeywell 200 Model 120 was introduced in 1965, but that seems to be the most common date given online. And, I am not certain that this machine was actually the one used by Sommerville. Many online sources says so, but they could all be copying an earlier mistake.

By: Jason Dyer

Jason Dyer — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:19:50 +0000

Ok, this is going to take some work.

There are multiple dates given at different places, including two totally different dates given at two different places on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_200

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transistorized_computers

http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/PROJET/honeywell200/h-200.htm

http://www.feb-patrimoine.com/histoire/english/chronoa6.htm

By: Jason Dyer

Jason Dyer — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 23:27:14 +0000

I’m pretty sure DREAMACHINE happened after the permutation poem program, and the patent for that was 1961

http://www.rexresearch.com/gysin/gysin.htm