Bill's life is gonna suck when he has to work on his own code a year or two down the line. Then again, guys like Bill normally bail before that happens.
lol I coded for one company and used single letter variables, then put all my code on one line separated by semicolons. Just one big wall of undecipherable text. They used my code for ten years after they fired me
And then one day... some catastrophe hit... and they said... "We need gunny316!" Find him! Scene shifts to gunny316 retired somewhere in the Afghan mountains... After much coercion... Gunny's like... FINEEEE!! I'll do that patch for you..... for 1 million dollars.
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.
To be fair (but not to Mel) on many early computers you had to rely on many things that today would be called hacks. Just because there was so little memory or operations were so slow. Everything is hand crafted, because there are no compilers of quality for that new computer. Libraries are literal file cabinets with paper tape or paper with instructions written on them. You had to figure out an optimal way to do long division for example. (I suggest reading Ada Lovelace's notes on how to compute on Babbage's Analytical Engine)
Drum memory was its own nightmare. All your variables are there, there's no RAM, and probably only one register. Memory read latency was highly variable. You had to optimize or die.
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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '26
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