TL;DR: 39 years ago The Story of Mel was published on Usenet by its author. Today, we launch Mel’s Loop project, with some fascinating details about the epic hacker folklore tale.<p>–<p>Today we celebrate the 39th anniversary of the first publication of The Story of Mel by Ed Nather. The Story of Mel was written as a memoir about the era of early computing of the late 1950s, creating a fresh memory of the days when Hackership was first forged. It continued to live through the years as an epic hacker folklore.<p>Little is known about the origins of The Story of Mel, its characters, and technical aspects. Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time researching the story. As I interviewed people who were related to it, I discovered some interesting details about the life and origins of Mel, Ed, and their stories, as well as the company where it all happened, and developed a deep perspective of Mel’s famous hack.<p>To celebrate this research, we launch today a new project: Mel’s Loop (<a href="https://melsloop.com" rel="nofollow">https://melsloop.com</a>), which includes an annotated version of the story, along with articles and other materials that are soon to be added to this web companion – related to The Story of Mel, and to the Hacker Folklore genre in general.<p>During my research I was privileged to publish the translation of The Story of Mel into Hebrew, in an actual literary publication of a print literary periodical, last year. The Hebrew translation, together with Hebrew and English annotations, are now available on the Mel’s Loop website. I believe this is the first translation of the story, and hope the project will attract more translators of other languages.<p>That’s it for now. More to come, promise. Meanwhile, I invite you all to visit Mel’s Loop website at <a href="https://melsloop.com" rel="nofollow">https://melsloop.com</a>. If you want to contribute content, have any question, or anything else – please don’t hesitate to contact me, or follow the project’s Twitter account @aboutmelsloop.<p>To conclude this post, here’s a short excerpt from the initial biography entry for Mel Kaye (or as I later found out, Melvin Kornitzky, may he rest in peace) as it appears in annotation next to Mel’s name, on the project’s website:<p>–<p>Mel Kaye (Melvin Kornitzky, 1931-2018) was born in Brooklyn to a family of Jewish immigrants. During his childhood, the family moved to Los Angeles. In the Summer of 1956, Mel joined the commercial department of Librascope, a technology division within General Precision, which held government and army contracts. Mel worked as an Application Engineer in the Commercial Development department at the company's new and fancy Building 3 in Glendale, California. He also provided support to the company's clients on the LGP-30. Within a month from his hiring date, Mel was transferred, along with a few other engineers, to Royal-McBee, a business partner of General Precision that had taken the task of marketing and selling the LGP-30. During his time in Royal-McBee, Mel wrote a Blackjack game that ran on the LGP-30, which soon became the flagship demo program for the new machine and was widely used by the company.<p>When the RPC-4000 was launched, Mel re-wrote (or 'ported') the Blackjack program to be compatible with the RPC-4000, for which he also wrote parts of the Assembly. As we know from The Story of Mel, Mel also helped Ed Nather with the task of writing a Fortran Compiler to that machine. Due to some differences of opinion with the company's management, Mel left Royal-McBee in the early 1960s. Some relics remained of his work, including a few hand-written code sheets and a usage guide to the Blackjack program for the RPC-4000.