4 ms·
The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
The annotations are at https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node2.html https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node2.....
- BruceEel 1y agoVery cool, those annotations! Are there any photos of 'drum memory'?
- ksenzee 1y agoIt’s almost time for someone to annotate these 1996 annotations to explain “hard disks” and “floppy disks.”
- andybak 1y agoIf only hyperlinks were a thing...
- dang 1y agoPossibly this edition predates the web. The page has 1996 on it but could well have been created before then. I've replaced the submitted URL (https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/mel-annotated.html https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/mel-an...) with the Story part, and added the Annotations part to the top text. Maybe that'll help.
- degamad 1y agoFrom the "About this Document" page (https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node3.html https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node3....) About this document ... The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 95.1 (Fri Jan 20 1995) Copyright © 1993, 1994, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. The command line arguments were: latex2html mel-annotated.tex. The translation was initiated by Erik Brunvand on Tue Oct 15 13:41:12 MDT 1996
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anteloper 1y agowhat a fantastic read
- dang 1y agoIt's been a while since we had a Mel thread. (It's good for the classics to reappear from time to time, especially for newer cohorts of users.) Related past discussions—others? 94 years ago today – Hacker legend Mel Kaye was born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695655 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695655 - Jan 2025 (1 comment) The Story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38981958 - Jan 2024 (2 comments) The Story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131315 - Aug 2023 (4 comments) Mel Kaye – CV - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188537 - June 2023 (2 comments) Show HN: We found the grave of hacking legend Mel Kaye - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36031476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36031476 - May 2023 (2 comments) Show HN: 40th Anniversary – Who are you, Mel Kaye? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36019424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36019424 - May 2023 (4 comments) LGP-30 found in basement, the same model of drum computer programmed by “Mel” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33514399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33514399 - Nov 2022 (53 comments) Mel's Hack – The Missing Bits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392127 - Oct 2022 (48 comments) The Story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395589 - Aug 2022 (167 comments) Mel's Loop – A Comprehensive Guide to The Story of Mel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458048 - May 2022 (2 comments) The Story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20671031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20671031 - Aug 2019 (3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273 (July 2019 - classic comment by YeGoblynQueenne) LGP-30 – A Drum Computer of Significance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20484330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20484330 - July 2019 (39 comments) A Real Programmer: The Story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19283255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19283255 - March 2019 (2 comments) The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11820569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11820569 - June 2016 (4 comments) The Story of Mel Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913835 - July 2015 (25 comments) The Story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017099 - Feb 2015 (8 comments) The Story Of Mel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869771 - June 2014 (77 comments) A picture of Mel Kaye (the Real Programmer) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3110883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3110883 - Oct 2011 (5 comments) Mel the programmer was a real person - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155322 - Feb 2010 (16 comments) The story of Mel (1983) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678999 - June 2009 (22 comments) The story of Mel, a Real Programmer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181144 - May 2008 (9 comments)
- naniwaduni 1y agoA bit of trivia I like to bring up when this comes around: those "hexadecimal numbers"? The digits would've gone 0-9fgjkqw.
- MBCook 1y agoAfter he finished his vacuum tube computer, the UE-1, I got hooked on the Usagi Electric channel on YouTube. One of the things he did was restore a Bendix G-15. It seems to use 0-9quvwxyz. Does anyone know how/when they were standardize to what we have today?
- naniwaduni 1y agoSeemingly not before the late 70s, at least—tar and cpio encode their numbers as octal(!) numerals.
- philiplu 1y agoI’m pretty sure that’s due to Unix’s early existence on PDP machines from DEC, which used octal instead of hex for encoding binary values. Why DEC did that I don’t know - I never got a chance to use DEC equipment back in the 70s.
- anyfoo 1y agoSeveral PDPs used 18 bit word sizes (we standardized on 8 bit bytes and multiples for word sizes later on). 18 is not divisible by 4, but it is divisible by 3. An octal digit groups three bits together, just like a hexadecimal digit groups 4 bits together.
- anyfoo 1y agoOctal has advantages to be more readable when you are dealing with bits in groups of threes (or multiples), just like the decimal is advantageous when dealing with bits in groups of fours (or multiples). In UNIX-like systems (and POSIX in general), POSIX permissions are in groups of threes: rwx for user, group, and others. Hence `chmod 777` means "rwx for user, group, others" (i.e. everyone can do everything), `chmod 0644` means "rw for user, r for group and others", and so on. Before we standardize on 8 bit bytes, there were all kinds of word sizes. Some machines had 18 bit words, for example. 18 is divisible by 3, but not by 4, so octal made more sense for those at least.
- drfuchs 1y agoThe annotations say "... I don't have the exact instruction format for the either the LGP-30 or RPC-4000 ..." but the entire manual for the LGP-30 with this information, and way more, is available at http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/royalPrecision/LGP-30/LGP-30_Operations_Manual.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/royalPrecision/LGP-30/LGP-30_Op... In 1973, Mr. Willoughby taught the Abington (Pennsylvania) High School computer programming class to code in LGP-30 assembly language. We didn't actually have an LGP-30; it just happened to be what he had been taught on when he was young. All assignments were graded by him simulating your code in his head. Of course, we then went on to learn the (slightly) higher-level NEAT/3 language, for which the school actually had an NCR Century-100 mainframe that would run programs that we submitted on punch cards. Mr. Willoughby's (nobody knew teachers' first names back in the day) theory was that it was important to learn the lowest-level machine language first, so you could understand what was really going on underneath. Worked fine for me; evidently it's not quite so universal anymore.
- jpgvm 1y agoI think going as far as assembly up front is probably not worth it, also it's hard to keep people engaged at that level as it's difficult to make the computer do exciting things with assembler. However I strongly believe it's good to start with C. You can still rather quickly do interesting stuff, C is a small language so learning the language itself isn't a huge barrier. A big benefit of the small language is that it leaves more time available to explore important concepts, not just the super low level ones (memory/pointers, etc) but really important parts of the stack that are infectious to everything else. Specifically things like syscalls and the libc interface that most other languages are essentially built on top of. Working with building blocks like pthreads directly is also very important IMO, both to get a handle on parallelism and concurrency primitives but also to learn why high level languages are so valuable. Similarly for stuff like important socket APIs ala select/epoll and implementing your own event loop. I was lucky enough to learn all of this early in my career and luckier still to have been able to pass on this knowledge to many mentees over the years. If there are any aspiring programmers here that want to build from a solid foundation then yeah, ignore the haters, write some C. man pages and ironically ChatGPT are your friend, use them to explore the foundations of (most) modern code so when you start writing modern code in earnest/for money you will be substantially ahead of your peers in actual understanding.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anyfoo 1y agoThe very excellent "Advent of Computing" computer history podcasts had an episode involving The Story of Mel relatively recently: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/acting-up/id1459202600?i=1000701491554 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/acting-up/id1459202600... It provides a lot of context, and puts things into perspective. Note that it helps to be familiar with The Story of Mel before listening to that episode. I think the podcast may have explained The Store of Mel itself in a previous episode that I haven't listened to yet, but I was personally familiar with it already through the usual folklore.
- II2II 1y agoMel was discussed in episode 114 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lgp-30-a-forgotten-machine/id1459202600?i=1000624471933 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lgp-30-a-forgotten...), and there was a special episode which included a reading of the story (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reading-the-story-of-mel/id1459202600?i=1000625790180 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reading-the-story-of-m...). The machine also pops up from time to time when the host discusses "personal computers", which he has a very interesting definition of!
- alnwlsn 1y agoDavid of the Usagi Electric youtube channel received an LGP-21 computer (not Mel's LGP-30) a while ago which will become a future channel project. But along with it, he received a binder of LGP-30 code... with a bunch of programs written by Mel himself! Apparently, Mel worked for Librascope for quite a while and wrote a lot of stuff. Mel's code is supposedly somewhat better commented and less cryptic than he is usually credited for (though from what I've heard self-modifying code on the LGP-30 was a somewhat intended feature). Whether or not that applies to Mel's blackjack program is probably anyone's guess. A paper tape dump of it is known to be out there, but I don't think the source code is. The idea is to study some of those programs and maybe port a few to understand how the LGP-21 works (they are supposed to be similar), since so far I don't think much documentation on the LGP-21 has been found.
- habedi0 1y agoThe Story of Mel is all you need?
- Shorel 1y agoThis version combines the annotations and the text: https://jamesseibel.com/the-story-of-mel/ https://jamesseibel.com/the-story-of-mel/
- oc1 1y agoOh yeah, i've met enough of these Mel dudes, who refuse to adapt and won't touch ai productivity tools because it's not real programming to them. Guess who is deploying his third app this week ;)
- adiabatichottub 1y agoThe old, poster-sized machinist's tooling chart on the wall in our shop has a great quote at the bottom: "Nobody will remember how long it took to do the job, but they will remember how well you did it."
- satiated_grue 1y agoTo be fair... not on an LGP-30, you didn't.
- reverendsteveii 1y agowhen I first read this story out of the back end of the jargon file in the 90s it felt like Deuteronomy for internet people. It still does.