The Story of Mel

The Story of Mel is an archetypical piece of computer programming folklore. Its subject, Mel Kaye, is the canonical Real Programmer.

Story

Ed Nather’s The Story of Mel details the extraordinary programming prowess of a former colleague of his, "Mel", at Royal McBee Computer Corporation. Although originally written in prose, Nather’s story was modified by someone into a "free verse" form which has become widespread.

Little is known about Mel Kaye, beyond the fact that he was credited with doing the "bulk of the programming" on the 1959 ACT-1 compiler for the Royal McBee LGP-30 computer. In Nather's story, Kaye is portrayed as being prone to avoiding optimizing assemblers in favor of crafting code to take advantage of hardware quirks, for example taking advantage of the rotation of the LGP-30's drum memory to avoid writing delay loops into the code.

The story as written by Nather involved Kaye's work on rewriting a blackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system, the RPC-4000; company sales executives had requested to modify the program so that they could flip a front panel switch and cause the program to lose. Kaye reluctantly acceded to the request, but to his own delight, he got the test wrong, and the switch would instead cause the program to win every time.