Mel Kaye

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In hacker folklore, Mel Kaye is the archetypical real programmer. Kaye was formerly a programmer at Royal McBee. Ed Nather's "Story of Mel" details Mel's prowess at coding on bare metal. Although originally written in prose, Nather's story has been passed through the Internet so long that it now resembles free verse.

According to the Jargon File appendix where the story may be found, Kaye is (or was) indeed a real person. In a FOLDOC document, he is credited with doing the "bulk of the programming" on the Royal McBee LGP-30 computer.

[edit] References

• The Story of Mel, free-verse version
• The Story Of Mel, prose from FOLDOC
• Mel Kaye's signature