The Story of Mel

A group gathered around an LGP-30 console and Friden Flexowriter in a 1950s office, one person seated and typing with their back to the camera

If you spend any time around old computing folklore, you'll eventually run into “The Story of Mel,” a short piece written by programmer Ed Nather in 1983 and posted to Usenet, where it spread through the programming world and never really stopped circulating. It's about a real LGP-30 programmer, Mel Kaye, who wrote code by hand in raw machine instructions — not even assembly — and placed every instruction on the drum by calculating exactly which sector would be spinning under the head at the moment it was needed.

It's the best illustration anywhere of what programming this machine actually demanded, and of a kind of craftsmanship that the field has mostly lost. We won't reproduce the text here — it's still under copyright, and Nather's words deserve to stay exactly as he wrote them, hosted properly rather than copy-pasted around the web. Read it at the source:

The Story of Mel, at catb.org (The Jargon File)

Once you've read it, the LGP-30's drum and sector layout will make a lot more sense — and so will why “optimum programming” was a real, named skill in 1957.