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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

No discussion of infinite loops that aren't would be complete without a mention of The Story of Mel: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

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I read it when I was a kid (11/12)... along with Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal. I was chiefly impressed by both, for quite some time I thought both of the them were real and represented real(!) values. To this day I can quote quite a bit of both.

> both of the them were real …

Well, Mel's story is definitely real!

"The manual for the LGP-30 refers to “Mel Kaye of Royal McBee who did the bulk of the programming...” "

Indeed, Mel is (was?) real and we have a photo of him! If we go to Wikipedia for the LGP-30[0], it links to a wiki article on "The Story of Mel"[1] which names the titular "Mel" as "Melvin Kaye" with a citation, linking to a PDF scan[3] of an issue of "The Librazette" where on the first page, the photo on the left, in the very back and named last of all the people in the photo, is [sic]"Royal-McBee Applications Engineer Mel Kaye" standing and smiling in an all-white shirt.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel#cite_note-Lib...

[3] - https://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/1950_...

Thank you! I've been hunting for this story for years.

The story was featured on the YouTube channel "Computerphile".

https://youtu.be/XS3UBuZ7D34

This is an amazing read. I too was looking for this for a while.

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