Timeline for Reconstruct the loop from "The Story of Mel"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 10, 2023 at 19:25 | vote | accept | Quuxplusone | ||
| Jan 11, 2020 at 21:53 | comment | added | A. I. Breveleri | And remember that the point of Ed's story was never to expose the technical quirks of porting BlackJack from the LGP-30 to the RPC-4000. Ed was trying to convey the enormous intellectual effort required to squeeze any decent performance out of one of those primitive clunkers, and how one particular genius who thoroughly mastered the required techniques seemed to be operating on a completely different plane of existence. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 21:50 | comment | added | Chromatix | @A.I.Breveleri The story does specifically say that the blackjack program was rewritten for the RPC-4000. Simply running it under an emulator doesn't seem to fit that narrative. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 21:44 | comment | added | A. I. Breveleri | There's no direct evidence for this, but it's possible that Mel Kaye wrote BlackJack for the LGP-30; someone wrote a LGP-30 emulator for the RPC-4000; the emulator was imperfect and BlackJack cheated backwards under the emulator; and Ed Nather was tasked with fixing this vital application. It's easy to believe that failing to find a bug in a Mel program under an LGP-30 emulator running on a RPC-4000 could lead to some confusion when recalling events decades later. | |
| Jan 11, 2020 at 19:43 | history | answered | Chromatix | CC BY-SA 4.0 |