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The Story of Mel (1983)

cs.utah.edu

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Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#101

Post by Suzuran »

kps wrote: post #97
Suzuran wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted for the effort of responding in verse, very nice. That rubbed me the wrong way too. Even the hackers at MIT documented their hacks, they even wrote up a memo explaining a bunch of them so others could understand and build on them - see HAKMEM. Documentation was much more extensive and available back then. Systems frequently came with full schematics, and you could call the design team on the phone if you want…

The story is known to be inaccurate in technical detail¹, so it's not impossible that it's inaccurate in social detail as well. There's some LGP-30 code on Bitsavers including scanned coding forms, and the ones initialled ‘MK’ are not notably different in level of commentary from the others. ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489273

Ah, I didn't know that. As for the code on Bitsavers, I'll have to check that out. I should have expected there would be something there - Al is a gem (albeit a cranky old gem), and I wish he'd get more love.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#102

Post by ngvrnd »

My great-aunt Gloria told me at this year's family reunion that she had used machine language (not assembler, she was quick to add) when she started programming.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#103

Post by drfuchs »

tjoff wrote: post #23
naniwaduni wrote: post #7

Bonus trivia: those "Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers"? Those would not have been the 0-9a-f we're familiar with today, but 0-9fgjkqw[1]! [1]: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R4.13

I'm disgusted... What was the motivation for that?

The convention of using "ABCDEF" didn't get established until well after the LGP-30 was designed in the 1950's. The Wikipedia entry on "Hexadecimal" says "The now-current notation using the letters A to F establishes itself as the de facto standard beginning in 1966, in the wake of the publication of the Fortran IV manual for IBM System/360, which (unlike earlier variants of Fortran) recognizes a standard for entering hexadecimal constants."

The comments elsewhere that note the layout of the Flexowriter character set risk conflating cause with effect. The single-character mnemonics for the sixteen hardware instructions were chosen by the LGP-30 designers to be, well, mnemonic; and then the remaining characters FGJKQW were left to represent the values ten through fifteen. This then forced the assignment of character positions for the Flexowriter device, so that no table lookup would be required when reading opcode mnemonics and also when reading hex numbers; all bits could just be shifted into place in both cases.

Trigger warning: The phrase we were taught was standard in the LGP community to help remember FGJKQW was, I'm afraid, "For Good Jokes, Kill Quiet Women." This seems to have been excised from the written lore fairly early on, as search engines have no record of it.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#105

Post by adrianmonk »

foobarbecue wrote: post #53

I like this new word "esthetics"! It's like a cross between ethics and aesthetics. How to do the right thing and make it look good too, I guess!

I think it's just a spelling variation. "Ae" or "æ" does show up in English words sometimes, but a lot of times it gets simplified to "e" (probably closer to the pronunciation).

Examples: "aeon"/"eon", "caesium"/"cesium", "paediatrician"/"pediatrician", "anaesthesia"/"anesthesia", "haemoglobin"/"hemoglobin", and "chimaera"/"chimera". And more debatably, "daemon"/"demon" and "aeroplane"/"airplane".

Generally, British spellings are more likely to have "ae" and American spellings are more likely to have "e".

But it only gets dropped in some words. You never see "erobic exercise", "erospace engineering", "erosol spray", or a conductor being called "mestro".

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#106

Post by krmboya »

nemo1618 wrote: post #76
eob wrote: post #60

I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond as a 90s kid and it had this story, as well as a few others. Das Blinkenlights and some AI Koans like the Broken Lisp Machine come to mind. I used to read them over and over, and it really left an imprint on me. The early hacker ethos was such a strong flavor. Sort of a "one part gnostic, one part mechanic, one part counterculture" vibe. Sometimes I wonder if that fl…

I've wondered this too. When my dad was learning to program, this was the culture. When I was learning to program, the culture was no longer fresh and alive, but its spirit was still strongly felt; the torch was being passed to us. Have we preserved that light? If my son learns to program, what will "hacker culture" mean to him?

Maybe being able to figure out strangers' discord passwords. More generally, phishing powers

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#107

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

adrianmonk wrote: post #105
foobarbecue wrote: post #53

I like this new word "esthetics"! It's like a cross between ethics and aesthetics. How to do the right thing and make it look good too, I guess!

I think it's just a spelling variation. "Ae" or "æ" does show up in English words sometimes, but a lot of times it gets simplified to "e" (probably closer to the pronunciation). Examples: "aeon"/"eon", "caesium"/"cesium", "paediatrician"/"pediatrician", "anaesthesia"/"anesthesia", "haemoglobin"/"hemoglobin", and "chimaera"/"chimera". And more debatably, "daemon"/"demon" and "aeroplane"/"airplane". Generally, British…

You forgot my favorite one: "vaginæ"/"vaginae" is an archaic plural of "vagina".

But "vagine" is not to be seen in any dictionaries afaik.

Cracks me up because Æ is a letter in the Norwegian alphabet with a completely different sound than the ae diphtong in English. So to me it looks like you started saying "vagina" but started screaming at the end.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#108

Post by username223 »

eob wrote: post #60

I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond as a 90s kid and it had this story, as well as a few others. Das Blinkenlights and some AI Koans like the Broken Lisp Machine come to mind. I used to read them over and over, and it really left an imprint on me. The early hacker ethos was such a strong flavor. Sort of a "one part gnostic, one part mechanic, one part counterculture" vibe. Sometimes I wonder if that fl…

> I bought the Hackers Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond

That hurts a bit to read. Raymond is/was a huckster who took the original Hackers Dictionary, a communal MIT project, and made some edits. He went on to annoy the Linux community with his CML2 antics around the build system. Lisp/MIT, BSD, and Linux all have their own histories, a mixture of forgettable drama and fundamental difference.

Re: The Story of Mel (1983)

#110

Post by dzdt »

naniwaduni wrote: post #7

Bonus trivia: those "Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers"? Those would not have been the 0-9a-f we're familiar with today, but 0-9fgjkqw[1]! [1]: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R4.13

Its even worse. The keyboard (as normal for typewriters of the day) had no numeral '1'. Instead you would type a lower-case 'L'. So the actual hex encoding is 0L23456789FGJKQW.
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