From: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Subject: Re: Mel: Fact or Fiction?
Reply-To: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 07:37:48 GMT

In article <1992Apr11.182833.1721@ceilidh.beartrack.com> dnichols@ceilidh.beartrack.com (Don Nichols (DoN.)) writes:
>In article <1992Apr7.204225.29833@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner) writes:
>
>	[ ... ]
>>
>>Demos are often produced under marginal circumstances.  Without Mel, there
>>was no demo.  This is obviously true, or else the company would have used
>>the former version that never cheated as opposed to the one they requested
>>which always cheated instead of selectively so.  From a management
>>perspective, blame Mel's boss for not maintaining "version control" :-).
>>
>>In any case, can someone date the year that core-memory machines made
>>NEW computers based on drum memory be passe?
>>
>>cjl
>
>	I thought that the program would cheat or not cheat depending on the
>stat of s sense switch.  What Mel got backwards was who was favored by the
>cheating.  The management wanted to be able to boost the egos of prospective
>customers by letting them win easily, but when the sense switch was set, the
>machine would cheat so that *IT* won, making it imposible for the customer
>to win.

I think you're right.  In any case, the former program became unavailable,
because otherwise management would never have required our narrator to
attempt to fix it.  They would have just used the old one.

If you are correct, it further vindicates Mel because it will always be
straight-forward to find where a test is backwards.  You just have to follow
the flow of the code to find the test itself.  Clearly, any competent
programmer would find a test instruction.  So, Mel should not be treated as
unable to find it, rather he deliberately feigned incompetance.  Our narrator
just followed the "code of honor" given him by Mel and also claimed to be
unable to find it either.  The alternative would demand that the problem was
a more serious design flaw than a backwards test.  Since the narrator tells
us that's all it was, this conclusion must follow.  Claiming Mel is actually
incompetent is inconsistant with the statements given.

So, the net conclusion of the Mel story is that he eventually caved in to
harassing pressure to be dishonest, but "fought fire with fire" in that he
made the program change ineffective relative to their unreasonable request,
obtained employment elsewhere for more money, and left behind him a "legacy"
of a program that was a good example of just what lengths a demo program
had to go to implement an efficiently running program on a drum memory 
machine.

A friend of mine wrote the famous -11 Lunar Lander program (Jack Burness).
Anyone who has looked at that code knows that it breaks all the "rules" for
PDP-11 programming, yet runs efficiently, and quite atypically.  The 11/05
it had to run on was both small and slow, so his unorthodox techniques were
necessary to get it to work.  Just another example of how demo programs can be
misleading in terms of comparative performance to an actual tentative 
application.

cjl (never had a drum memory machine (sob...) :-))

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