Wendy Nather40 years ago, my dad went viral on Usenet with this little gem: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
I found out recently (thanks @rmd1023) that there’s been a resurgence of interest and discussion of the story’s history, which I know would have tickled my dad immensely. https://www.metafilter.com/199386/40th-Anniversary-of-The-Story-of-Mel-Hacker-folklore
Even YouTube discussions: https://youtu.be/sB1lRnZVv30
Story of Mel - Computerphile
Trivia: my dad claimed that the version with his prose broken into free verse wasn’t his doing — but that’s exactly the way he wrote other prose prior to running it through nroff/troff. He broke up his sentences into phrases on separate lines because it made it easier to edit, and the formatter would get rid of all the line breaks afterwards anyway. So maybe he misremembered how he wrote it. 🤷🏻♀️
My dad hadn’t had any contact with Mel since the days depicted in the story, until sometime in 2013, when out of the blue he got an email that said, “So, I hear you’ve been talking about me on the Internet …”
At that point my dad was too debilitated from a stroke to be able to spend much time at his computer, but at least they were back in contact after all those years.
My dad passed away in 2014, but he would have loved to quibble and chat with all the folks dissecting this work now.
One more story: my dad used to program in his head. He’d sit in his armchair, fingers steepled, and stare off into space for hours. Then he’d get up, go to his PC, and type it all in.
Same thing with debugging. He’d get a call from someone describing a problem with the software, he’d sit down and think for a while, and then go “Ah!” and go sit down to fix it.
Of course, those were simpler days …
Greg Bell@wendynather people with expansive, well-ordered working memory are amazing to me, on the order of magicians