Mel is most likely a fictional programmer, although the story is told as a true story and uses real machines and real languages as examples. This story is clearly written to be read by computer programmers and as such it is full of technical terms and jargon. The very feats that mark Mel as a Real Programmer described later in the story are amazing only to the person who knows something about programming. In a companion to this paper I have included the entire Story of Mel along with extensive annotations that should make it more accessible to non-programmers. Mel comes from the golden age of hackers when computers were simple enough to be programmed by writing directly in the binary language of the machine.
Digital computers process all information in binary notation.
The nature of the switches used to build computers is such that the most fundamental operation a computer can do is simply recognize the difference between the representation of a 1 and a 0. If 1's and 0's are all the machine can understand at the most basic level, then programming directly in the language of the machine involves writing down long strings of 1's and 0's. In order to make these programs easier to write and understand, they can be abstracted into a symbolic form. The first abstraction is assembly language, where machine operations are described in words and those words are translated into binary numbers by a program called an assembler. With every abstraction, however, there is a loss of control.