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The Story of Mel is a tale well-known in hacker circles, and in the circles of those devoted to Real Programming and the adoration of it. It's become part of the folklore of programming. Mel was a Real Programmer, the Man's Man of the Programming Men. He didn't fumble with silly things like programming languages or assembly. He wrote in raw hexadecimal, writing code that was more efficient than even the best of the best of optimizing assemblers could produce. He wrote code that looked impossible but worked perfectly, not caring for trite things like 'delay loops' when he could just use hardware quirks to do it himself.

I present to you, The Story of Mel, posted by Ed Nather in Usenet group net.jokes in 1983.

You may think this is just apocryphal. I mean, come on. Mel Kaye is to the average programmer as Rambo is to the average man. Certainly he couldn't be real, right? Well, this is where programming is better than an action movie. Our Rambo is real. People who worked Royal McBee Computer Corporation can attest to the presence of Mel in artifacts like old programming forms and coding sheets.

Is Mel still alive? I don't know. I can't even find a picture of the legend. But he was a real man. A Real Programmer.

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NOPE.