
The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer (1983) - rdegges
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
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vidarh
For reference, there's a Wikipedia page about this [1]. Mel is believed to
have been Mel Kaye of Royal McBee Computer Corporation. There's a picture of
him here [2], and the article the picture is from here [3].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel)

[2]
[http://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png](http://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png)

[3]
[http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/1950_-...](http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/1950_-_1959_files/560800%20Librazette.pdf)

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Johnny_Brahms
We have all met someone like it. A colleague who now works in accounting
because of his dislike of all modern programming practices is maybe not Mel-
class, but I have yet to meet anyone who can read hexadecimal with his speed.

In the late nineties he apparently found a bunch of optimization errors in the
compiler the company used by spending an hour reading through the machine
code. I have seen him read machine code once, and it involved him scrolling by
holding the down arrow and stopping every 50 rows for 2 seconds. He not only
found the error on the first try, but also found a couple of potential bugs.

~~~
i336_
Where do I sign up to learn how to do that?

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dguaraglia
I remember reading this back when the "Hacker Jargon File" came as a package
with the Debian distro (probably on the second CD.) I wonder if the Jargon is
still maintained at all. With the current trend of constantly-changing
overloaded terms it'd be quite the undertaking.

(Yeah, yeah... get off my lawn!)

