The Story of Mel

This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.

A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:

This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together.

[1992 postscript --- the author writes: "The original submission to the net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it --- it was straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow."]