The Story of Mel and the LGP-30 Manual

Out of a coincidence, we came across the good old jargon file.. again. In it is the great Story Of Mel, who is a Real Programmer

For those who don’t know that story yet, here’s a teaser:

Since Mel knew the numerical value of every operation code, and assigned his own drum addresses, every instruction he wrote could also be considered a numerical constant. He could pick up an earlier “add” instruction, say, and multiply by it, if it had the right numeric value. His code was not easy for someone else to modify.

Go ahead and read it… but I’ve got some goodies to come, so please return…

Back? Good. Anyway, noticed the link at the bottom of that page? It’s an instruction manual for the LGP-30 computer. As always when I’m tired and should go to bed, it’s quite easy for me to get nerd sniped. So i started to read on in that manual and am now contemplating to write an emulator for this marvelous thingy, especially since I always come back to trying to design a programming language (including virtual machine and everything) for a long time now. It seems this could be an interesting exercise.

Ah well, it’s late.. But that idea is now parked somewhere in my mind, and also on here, so… Hi future me, here’s a great nerd snipe again! Hope i’m not as tired and generally busy when I get back at this.