This track is from 1981, before the Hacienda, before the explosion of the rave scene (the summer of love didn’t happen until 1988).

“This was forty years before Flesh night at the Hacienda and a gay genius was hardly the hot item in Manchester at that point. Alan [Turing] was an outsider in the world of Manchester’s successful computer department.

But at least he was able to play with the machine that only he had had the vision to imagine.

He sent out detailed workings to all his friends about the ‘Baby’ – for so, delightfully, was it named – and the baby’s babies, the follow-up machines. He suggested to his chums that anyone caring to write a ‘program’ for the Manchester machine should do so and come up and try it out. One friend, the head of maths at Harrow, a big-time public school famous for being near where Elton John was born, wrote back and said he had a program.

‘Come on up.’

Mr Strachey arrived on the train from Euston, as do most things that come to Manchester.

He spent the morning typing his program into a punch-card, for this indeed was the input method of 1950. All bloody morning.

And then the engineers, scientists, mathematicians and hangers-on stood back, and waited. Mr Strachey let his friend Alan insert the card.

‘Deeeerrrrrr, deeerrrrr, der der derrr derrrrrrrrrrrr,’ sang the computer.

God Save the bloody Queen. More shocking than the Pistols’ jubilee work-out. ‘Cause this was thirty cubic feet of valves and tubes and metal. And it was playing music. Kraftwerk, in what room or womb were you that lunchtime? The dawn of electronica was that moment.

Later that day, the machine gave a startling rendition of Glen Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, for it was that stage in the evolution of the popular song. And thirty odd years later, New Order were trying to make what had been dubbed in 1950 ‘the electronic brain’ do even more with music …

Tell me you can’t hear it. Tell me you can’t hear the world changing and the world arriving.” — Tony Wilson

• New Order – Everything’s Gone Green