A guy on Reddit found a couple of ancient computers in his grandparents' home. An LGP-30 (roughly from 1956) and what seem to be a pair of PDP-8e (released in 1970). The LGP-30 had a retail price of $47,000, equivalent to $470,000 in 2021. The PDP-8e had a price of $6500 when it was introduced.
This threw several people into a fit of nostagia, for a bit of 1980s programming lore.
In its raw, and unadulterated form, here is (the start, anyway) of The Story of Mel
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.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.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name. ...
Click thru for the whole thing.
Or if you think you need a gloss, with modern English explanation, as it were... The 'Story of Mel' Explained. (Hat tip to Pixy Misa.)
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