The One true Mel

A while back I blogged an entry about The story of Mel, a Real Programmer, a story which is nowadays legend in the circles of true nerds (like me 8-). The story was posted to a usenet newsgroup by Ed Nather in 1983. You can believe that it was 1983 because noone posts to usenet anymore. If they do, they don't call it usenet. Even if they do that they CERTAINLY don't give their email in UUCP form. (His UUCP email was, by the way, utastro!nather - so short! People would have chosen employers just to get an email like that!) Anyway, back to the story, which opens with the following paragrahs:

An article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement, "Real Programmers write in Fortran". Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code - not Fortran, not RATFOR, not even assembly language - Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers, directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corporation, a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.)

The trouble was, no-one knew who Mel was! (Inquiring minds need to know these sorts of details...)

Well in 1994 a guy by the name of Bill von Hagen stumbled across some manuals referring to a programmer of the Royal McBee Corporation called "Mel Kaye" and asked "Could this be the one true Mel?". How exciting!

More recently, images have been published of some of Mel's hand written coding sheets (here and here). These images come from a guy called Robert Lilly whose first programming experience was on a Royal McBee LGP-30. He also posts some manual images. Further geeky details of the Royal McBee line of computers (including the full text of an LGP-30 Programming manual) can be found at this link.

Gee I love this stuff - it's in my genes. Maybe that's because both my parents were programmers! (Are you reading this Samuel ;)