the story of mel :: essays research papers

"do real programmers program in fortran?" Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of faint beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and veridical Computers were do out of drums and nonhingness tubes, Real Programmers wrote in cable car encipher. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code.Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.Lest a whole vernal extension 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. Ill announce him Mel, because that was his name.I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter ships company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had scantily started to manufact ure the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and werent here to stay, anyway. (Thats why you havent heard of the company, or the computer.) I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my function to its wonders. Mel didnt approve of compilers. "If a program cant rewrite its own code," 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 compete blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at either show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to for each one other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed. Mels job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instru ction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO Put *that* in Pascals pipe and smoke it. Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the "read learning ability" and available for quick execution.the story of mel essays research papers "do real programmers program 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. Ill call him Mel, because that was his name.I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., 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 werent here to stay, anyway. (Thats why you havent heard of the company, or the computer.) I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didnt approve of compilers. "If a program cant rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?" Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most p opular computer program the company owned. It ran on the LGP-30 and played blackjack with potential customers at computer shows. Its effect was always dramatic. The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show, and the IBM salesmen stood around talking to each other. Whether or not this actually sold computers was a question we never discussed. Mels job was to re-write the blackjack program for the RPC-4000. (Port? What does that mean?) The new computer had a one-plus-one addressing scheme, in which each machine instruction, in addition to the operation code and the address of the needed operand, had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum, the next instruction was located. In modern parlance, every single instruction was followed by a GO TO Put *that* in Pascals pipe and smoke it. Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the "read head " and available for immediate execution.