Talk:Story of Mel

What a nonsense. This page glorifies writing programs that no one else can edit in an economical timeframe. Writing programs so no one can easily understand them is quite anti-open-source. --ThorstenStaerk 20:58, April 9, 2010 (UTC)

This is a period piece, and its mind-set predates open-source by decades. It also predates anything you could really call editing (if the program is punched into cards or even worse into punched paper tape or even worse than that entered one bit at a time through panel switches, you don't edit them, you re-punch some cards, re-punch the entire tape or re- switch them in entire). If you want to rail against such things, pick a more recent one such as "if it was hard to write it should be hard to read".

Nevertheless, this page does contain nonsense. Back in those days, programmers did not write in hexadecimal, and had never heard of hexadecimal, which did not even have a name until IBM started making machines that used 8-bit bytes. Come to think of it, the term "bytes" had not been coined either. The reason was that hardware was so astronomically expensive, that most machines were build around 6-bit characters, encoded in the 6-bit BCD (binary-coded-decimal) code, which in turn was designed to work well with the way punched cards were coded in 80 12-row columns. These all changed in the early 1960's with the advent of the IBM System/360 and it's 8-bit bytes. BCD was supplanted by EBCDIC, and cards were allowed to have more than two holes punched per column.

By the way, there were not enough bits to represent upper- and lower-case differently, so pretty much all computer output was IN ALL UPPERCASE. This was the origin of regarding uppercase as "normal" for computer communication. You still see remnants of it from time to time.

What was used instead was octal, which works more naturally with 6-bit characters. Or, for the purist, binary. Yes, when working with machine code, you have to be so aware of individual bits that sometimes binary is more natural than even octal.

Take from one who was there. --4dummies 13:01, April 23, 2013 (UTC)