Sometime between 1956-1958 an unknown IBM employee wrote a punchcard program that displayed the above pin-up girl on the screens of the US military’s two billion dollar Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) computers. Some say that the program was a diagnostic tool that showed the pin-up as a data transfer test. Others contend that it was just geek fun. The Atlantic’s Benj Edwards tells the story of what was one of the first pieces of figurative computer art. “The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame)“
