ty!
206 karma · joined February 1, 2021
Few questions: - Were you soloing the entire thing? What about ops/research/market analysis? What about the design?
- Did you think about it as product-first or technology-first? Other words, did you build a solution for scoped audio mgmt, or a music player for kids?
- What's your tests status? Full coverage? CI/CD?
- How did you approach the entire legal aspect? Single lawyer? Self? Not at all?
Previously: App Store web has exposed all its source code - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804664
More info in Mel's Loop (see link)
> Another piece that worked better than expected was the telephone operator. Roger was keen to illustrate the personal disconnect of being on the road. We were in L.A. at Producer’s Workshop so I phoned my neighbour, Chris Fitzmorris in London. He had the keys to my flat and I asked him to go there and said that I would call him through an operator. “No matter how many times I call”, I said, “just pick up the phone, say ‘Hello’, let the operator speak and then hang up”. I placed a telephone in a soundproof area, got on to an extension phone and started recording to ¼” tape. It took a couple of operators – the first 2 were a bit abrupt, but the 3rd was perfect. I told her that I wanted to make a collect call to Mrs. Floyd. “Who’s calling?” she asked. “Mr. Floyd”, I replied. Chris’s timing was terrific, over and over he would hang up just at the right moment and she became genuinely concerned. “Is there supposed to be someone there besides your wife?” I was playing her along saying things like “No! I don’t know who that is!” “What’s going on?” and she would try the call again. Unwittingly, she was helping to tell the story. Afterwards I went through the ¼” and edited my voice out, just leaving her and Chris. I sometimes wonder if she ever heard herself on the record.
Source: https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41880709
Mel's Hack – The Missing Bits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392127
Mel's Loop – A Comprehensive Guide to The Story of Mel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458048
For years, "Mel" was considered to be a fictional character. Though some details about him were found, still there was not much known about the life and works for Mel Kaye. Until today, when Mel's identity is finally revealed.
After years of researching, digging into public archives, and searching for actual proofs, Mel’s Loop project publishes a new biographical article – "Mel Kaye – CV", and unfolds the true identity of Mel Kaye (born Melvin Kornitsky, 1931), a child to a family of Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn from Poland and Russia, that grew up in Los Angeles, and became a hacking legend.
Happy Mel day, hackers!
We're totally into more translations. I'll contact the author and see if we can add it. Thanks!
Why go to archive.ph, though, when you can go directly to https://melsloop.com/docs/mels-hack-the-missing-bits ? - should work nicely on mobile.
The idea behind it was to annoy the marketing people, disregard their request, and help the machine win every game, instead of the other way around.
The Jargon file is the source of all sources. I've read it there. We've created Mel's Loop to dive deep into the story, translate it into multiple languages (Hebrew edition is available on the site) and give room to the historical and folklore research that we did around the story.
More on that in the Preface article on the site: https://melsloop.com/docs/preface
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Today we celebrate the 39th anniversary of the first publication of The Story of Mel by Ed Nather. The Story of Mel was written as a memoir about the era of early computing of the late 1950s, creating a fresh memory of the days when Hackership was first forged. It continued to live through the years as an epic hacker folklore.
Little is known about the origins of The Story of Mel, its characters, and technical aspects. Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time researching the story. As I interviewed people who were related to it, I discovered some interesting details about the life and origins of Mel, Ed, and their stories, as well as the company where it all happened, and developed a deep perspective of Mel’s famous hack.
To celebrate this research, we launch today a new project: Mel’s Loop (https://melsloop.com), which includes an annotated version of the story, along with articles and other materials that are soon to be added to this web companion – related to The Story of Mel, and to the Hacker Folklore genre in general.
During my research I was privileged to publish the translation of The Story of Mel into Hebrew, in an actual literary publication of a print literary periodical, last year. The Hebrew translation, together with Hebrew and English annotations, are now available on the Mel’s Loop website. I believe this is the first translation of the story, and hope the project will attract more translators of other languages.
That’s it for now. More to come, promise. Meanwhile, I invite you all to visit Mel’s Loop website at https://melsloop.com. If you want to contribute content, have any question, or anything else – please don’t hesitate to contact me, or follow the project’s Twitter account @aboutmelsloop.
To conclude this post, here’s a short excerpt from the initial biography entry for Mel Kaye (or as I later found out, Melvin Kornitzky, may he rest in peace) as it appears in annotation next to Mel’s name, on the project’s website:
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Mel Kaye (Melvin Kornitzky, 1931-2018) was born in Brooklyn to a family of Jewish immigrants. During his childhood, the family moved to Los Angeles. In the Summer of 1956, Mel joined the commercial department of Librascope, a technology division within General Precision, which held government and army contracts. Mel worked as an Application Engineer in the Commercial Development department at the company's new and fancy Building 3 in Glendale, California. He also provided support to the company's clients on the LGP-30. Within a month from his hiring date, Mel was transferred, along with a few other engineers, to Royal-McBee, a business partner of General Precision that had taken the task of marketing and selling the LGP-30. During his time in Royal-McBee, Mel wrote a Blackjack game that ran on the LGP-30, which soon became the flagship demo program for the new machine and was widely used by the company.
When the RPC-4000 was launched, Mel re-wrote (or 'ported') the Blackjack program to be compatible with the RPC-4000, for which he also wrote parts of the Assembly. As we know from The Story of Mel, Mel also helped Ed Nather with the task of writing a Fortran Compiler to that machine. Due to some differences of opinion with the company's management, Mel left Royal-McBee in the early 1960s. Some relics remained of his work, including a few hand-written code sheets and a usage guide to the Blackjack program for the RPC-4000.