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in honor of National Novel Generation Month (#NaNoGenMo), here's a partial timeline outlining the early history of computer-generated books
1956: Pfizer, Inc., carries out the bizarre project of printing and binding a book of computer-generated drug names
late 1950s: several projects use computers to produce the content of numerical tables & concordances published as books—the press goes wild
1963: a curious Swedish governmental project results in a print run of a book containing computer-generated surnames
1963: the earliest known book-length volume of computer poetry—"La Machine a écrire mise en marche et programmée par Jean A. Baudot"—appears
1963: linguist Joe Grimes develops an early story generator whose outputs were to be compiled into a collection of generated short stories
(the book was never published, but you can read more about Grimes's project here)
1971: similarly, Sheldon Klein planned to have his story generator write a complete novel, to be surreptitiously published as a human work
(likewise, his book was never published, but you can read more about Klein's system in this thread)
1975: Carole Spearin McCauley publishes a novel that integrates human- and computer-authored prose (and more)
1980: for the first time, a publisher releases a novel that is claimed to have been written solely by a computer
1984: Raktor's "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" becomes a famous example of a work w/ purported computer origins (likely untrue)
1993: an obscure novel incorporates perhaps the greatest level of computer contribution to date—a lawsuit follows
2013: #NaNoGenMo is born
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