I think I found Melvin Kaye's obituary a few years ago but I couldn't find it anymore. A pity that both him and Ed Nather passed away :(
The Story of Mel (1983)
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Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#12Wow this is a blast from the past! First time I’ve read this was in a (paper) magazine some 25 years ago, one of the journalists was kind enough to translate it. The story was like a magnet to me as a high-school freshman, I must have reread it 20-30 times in the following weeks.
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#13This was assigned reading in one of my university CS courses, and although it was great fun then, as we were mostly all novice programmers learning Java of all things, the madness of the story didn't hit me until a few years later when I had done much more work with C and pointer math.
This part in particular, taken from Wikipedia, still reads to me like Necronomicon level black magic:
> But when x was already the highest possible address, not only did the address wrap around to 0, but a 1 was carried into the bits from which the opcode would be read
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#14Can some way more experienced than me ELI5 why the inner loop part was so clever? I'm the most novice of programmers and have never touch anything remotely like pointers so feel I am missing the lightbulb moment the author clearly got. Many thanks.
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#15Can some way more experienced than me ELI5 why the inner loop part was so clever? I'm the most novice of programmers and have never touch anything remotely like pointers so feel I am missing the lightbulb moment the author clearly got. Many thanks.
From the wikipedia article:
Eventually he realized that Kaye was using self-modifying code to process elements of an array, and had coded the loop in such a way as to take advantage of an overflow. Adding 1 to the address field of an instruction that referred to address x normally just changed the address to x+1. But when x was already the highest possible address, not only did the address wrap around to 0, but a 1 was carried into the bits from which the opcode would be read—in this case changing the opcode to "jump to" so that the full instruction became "jump to address 0".
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#16This page [0] includes an analysis of the manual for the possible machine Mel programmed in the story along with a probable photograph of him.
[1] is an instruction manual for the blackjack program itself, written by Mel.
Classic story solidly in the “should be reposted every six months or so” cohort.
0: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/macho-programmers-drum-mem...
1: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/royalPrecision/RPC-40...
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#17More info about the “drum computer” this was written on: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/lgp-30
Previous discussion where another person tried to replicate this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20484330
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#18Sadly we have strayed to the other extreme. From "every instruction is precious" right over to, "who cares how many instructions I use?"
Nowadays, desktop apps which started in an instant 20 years ago, seem to take several seconds even before they are even doing anything useful like loading a project or whatever. Even things like Visual Studio looking through the MRU project list can take 10 seconds (probably a threading issue) and VSCode, Teams and others are equally unimpressive - in fact the browser, the one thing that should be slow due to the network, is usually fastest when using a well-written site.
I'm not sure whether the multi-platform desktop app was ever a great idea. How much time have we saved "not writing multiple apps" but have instead ended up with slow, bloated software that doesn't usually run multi-platform, at least not all the time in the same way.
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#19Sadly we have strayed to the other extreme. From "every instruction is precious" right over to, "who cares how many instructions I use?" Nowadays, desktop apps which started in an instant 20 years ago, seem to take several seconds even before they are even doing anything useful like loading a project or whatever. Even things like Visual Studio looking through the MRU project list can take 10 seconds (probably a threa…
The developer time is saved by not writing multiple apps, fuck the end user, who cares about their time?
Seriously, I have to really think about when was the last time there wasn't some degree of unnecessary friction in an application. It really feels like being an end user of modern tech is like being in an abusive relationship.
Re: The Story of Mel (1983)
#20https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
Found the instruction on how to play the game in the further reading of the Wiki - https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ro...
It was nice to see the original write up and to read how about it worked for the user.