Mind Hacking by John Hargrave

Author:John Hargrave
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Gallery Books

The Story of The Story of Mel

One of the classic pieces of hacker literature is a text document called The Story of Mel. Originally circulated on the Usenet newsgroup net.jokes, the story recounts the godlike programming abilities of a developer named Mel. Written in a reverent poetry-prose, the story has the cadence and feel of a piece of holy scripture.

Little is known about Mel, but subsequent generations of geeks have theorized he was an actual person: Mel Kaye, who wrote the software for the 1959 Royal McBee LGP-30 computer. Mel had created a blackjack game for the LGP-30, one of the first of its kind. The Royal McBee sales reps would take the LGP-30 to trade shows, where they would let prospective customers play the blackjack game. It’s hard to remember there was a day when most people had never played a computer game, and the experience was so thrilling that it usually sold the LGP-30 on the spot, even though it was a business computer.

There was only one problem: Mel’s blackjack game was too good. Sometimes the prospective customers lost, if you can imagine that. Concerned they were losing out on valuable sales opportunities, the Royal McBee sales reps approached Mel and told him the game was “too fair.” They asked if he could modify the blackjack game so they could secretly flip a switch on the LGP-30 when they wanted to let prospective customers win.

Mel was morally opposed to this change. His code was statistically perfect, an elegant representation of real-world blackjack odds. How dare they ask him to insert an error into his perfect simulation! After getting some heat from above, Mel reluctantly complied. When he tested the “cheat switch,” however, he found the computer cheated in the opposite direction, so the computer always won. He was delighted with this hack, of course, and eventually left the company without fixing it.

Enter the author of the story, a programmer named Ed Nather, who was brought into Royal McBee and asked to fix Mel’s code. As he began digging into the masterpiece that Mel had left behind, he was astounded by the elegance and genius of Mel’s code.

I have often felt that programming is an art form,

whose real value can only be appreciated

by another versed in the same arcane art;

there are lovely gems and brilliant coups

hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,

by the very nature of the process.

You can learn a lot about an individual

just by reading through his code,

even in hexadecimal.

Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.4

Mel refused the help of any compilers or assemblers; he wrote in straight hex code, which looks like this:

> 79 6f 75 20 61 72 65 20 6e 6f 74 20 79 6f 75 72 20 6d 69 6e 64

The author writes reverently of Mel’s machine-level hacks, such as “writing the innermost parts of his program loops first, so they would get first choice of the optimum address locations on the drum”—in other words, optimizing his code at the lowest possible level so that his programs would run with maximum efficiency on the LGP-30.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.