The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)

Summary

Next: Annotations Up: The Story of Mel Previous: The Story of Mel This was first posted to Usenet on May 21, 1983. [1] A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in FORTRAN. [2] Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and ``user-friendly'' software [3] but back in the Good Old Days, when the term ``software'' sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, [4] Real Programmers wrote in machine code. [5] Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language [6][7][8]. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. [9] Directly. [10] 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. [11] I'll call him Mel, because that was his name. I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., [12] a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, [13] a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) [14] drum-memory computer, [15] and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, [16] bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, [17] and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.) [18] I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler [19] for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers. ``If a program can't rewrite its own code'', [20] he asked, ``what good is it?'' Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. [21] Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, [22] and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold compu...