Program Erato
Louis T. Milic
A facsimile of an early computer-generated book.
1971 / 2020
5.5 x 8.5 inches
28 pages
Edition of 216
Printing: Digital
Binding: Side-stapled
Though preceded at least by Jean A. Baudot’s La machine à écrire (1964), Manfred Krause and Götz F. Schaudt's Computer-Lyrik (1967), and Alison Knowles and James Tenney’s A House of Dust (c. 1968), Louis T. Milic’s Program ERATO (1971) was likely the first volume of computer poetry published in the United States. Further contributing to its intrigue is Milic’s status as an important apologist for computer poetry, and the most prominent scholar and critic of the form writing in English in its first two decades.
Aleator Press has taken special care to reproduce this booklet accurately, with due attention to the construction, material, typography, layout, and style of the original edition that was created by The Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1971. That edition is believed to have been released in a small run of 300 to 500 copies and, despite languishing in obscurity ever since, copies of the original booklet are very difficult to obtain. Hence our new edition, which has been approved by the Louis T. Milic estate.
This facsimile booklet appears in an edition of 216 copies, which corresponds to the number of possible outcomes of a roll of three dice. Each copy is hand-stamped with one of these unique dice rolls, and as such, the booklets are enumerated using a bijective senary notation.
Program ERATO is the first publication of Aleator Press and the initial offering in our Regenerators series, which will include reprints of scarce early volumes of computer-generated text, as well as speculative editions that imagine artful publications in this area that could have appeared, but never did — until now.
Louis T. Milic (1922–2003) was a scholar and practitioner who made pioneering contributions to the digital humanities over an academic career spanning decades. Born in Yugoslavia, he spent his teenaged years in New York and earned his PhD at Columbia in 1963. Milic also taught there, at Teachers College, from 1955–69. From 1969–78, he chaired the English department at Cleveland State University (CSU) and served on its faculty until his retirement in 1991. He is best known for his computer-mediated work in stylistic analysis, which began with his PhD thesis, one of the first in what is now called the digital humanities.
