The Story of Mel (1983)

Real Programmers write 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. 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. "If a program can't rewrite its own code", he asked, "What good is it?" Mel had written, in hexadecimal, the most popular computer program the company owned. There was a program to do that job, an "Optimizing assembler", but Mel refused to use it. They wanted Mel to modify the program so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console, they could change the odds and let the customer win. Mel finally gave in and wrote the code, but he got the test backwards, and, when the sense switch was turned on, the program would cheat, winning every time. Sure enough, the next program instruction was in address location zero, and the program went happily on its way.