Molnár’s Paris: CIRCE, the Orsay Computing Centre

After finally accessing her machine réelle, Vera Molnár could no longer be without it. She had no official role at CIRCE, the computing centre in Orsay, but its director let her use leftover machine time on evenings and weekends: an IBM System/370 mainframe computer, its IBM 2250 screen and a Benson drum plotter. Most of her plotter work from the 1970s was created here, “shrunk in a corner, the last in line,” as she told Hans Ulrich Obrist. The now-legendary sprocket-holed sheets carry the machine’s stamp: a date code, the hour of calculation and “JOB FROM MOLNAR.” The Molnárs wrote the Molnart program together, in Fortran.