his spare time, Strachey developed a program for the game of draughts (also known as "checkers"), which he finished a preliminary version in May 1951. The game completely exhausted the Pilot ACE's memory. The draughts program tried to run for the first time on 30 July 1951 at NPL, but was unsuccessful due to program errors. When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. By the summer of 1952, the program could "play a complete game of Draughts at a reasonable speed". While he did not give this game – which may have been the first video game – a name, Noah Wardrip-Fruin named it "M. U. C. Draughts." Strachey programmed the first ever music performed by a computer; a rendition of the British National Anthem "God Save the King" on the Mark II Manchester Electronic Computer at Manchester, in 1951. Later that year, short extracts of three pieces were recorded there by a BBC outside broadcasting unit: "God Save the King", "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and "In the Mood". Researchers at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch restored the acetate master disc in 2016 and the results may be heard on SoundCloud. During the summer of 1952, Strachey programmed a love letter generator for the Mark II that is known as the first example of computer-generated literature. In May 1952, Strachey gave a two-part talk on "the study of control in animals and machines" ("cybernetics") for the BBC Home Service's Science Survey programme. Strachey worked for the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) from 1952 to 1959. While working on the St. Lawrence Seaway project, he was able to visit several computer centres in the United States and catalogue their instruction sets. Later, he worked on programming both the Elliott 401 computer and the Ferranti Pegasus computer. Together with Donald B. Gillies, he filed three patents in computing design including the design of base registers for program relocation. He also worked on the analysis of vibration in aircraft, working briefly with Roger Penrose. In 1959, Strachey left NRDC to become a computer consultant working for NRDC, EMI, Ferranti and other organisations on a number of wide-ranging projects. This work included logical design for computers, providing autocode and later the design