term% cat index.txt The Story of Mel is also known as Real Programmers write in FORTRAN. Posted to
Usenet by its author, Ed Nather, on May 21, 1983. The events occur at Royal
McBee Computer Corporation.
The original submission to the net was not in free verse, nor any
approximation to it — it was straight prose style, in non-justified
paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the
‘free verse' form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net.
That seems appropriate, somehow.
- 1992 postscript
The Royal McBee computers were developed and manufactured by Librascope, and
the documentation written for the blackjack program was written by Mel Kaye
of Librascope Inc. The August 1956 edition of the Librazette, the Librascope
newsletter, contains a story about training on the LGB-30, and mentions that
some Librascope application engineers were transferred to the Royal McBee
payroll. Among the engineers named is Mel Kaye. There is a photograph on the
front page of that issue showing that first class of neophyte LGB-30
programmers and the instructors, including Mel Kaye.
- Wikipedia, The Story of Mel