There’s a charming piece of foundation lore that every programmer in my cohort read and admired: The Story of Mel. Even when I was writing assembly language exclusively, the story was about a bygone era and techniques that no one still used. But Mel was cast as a “real programmer” of the sort no longer extant but nevertheless worthy of our praise and admiration.
I don’t know if younger programmers know about Mel so if you don’t, follow the link and read the story of Mel. I’ll be here when you get back. Even when I was young and naive, I didn’t believe the story was real and always considered it an apocryphal story about a sort of Platonic ideal of the perfect programmer. Everyone I know shared that opinion.
It turns out, though, we were all wrong and Mel really did exist and really did write the famous Black Jack program. His name was Mel Kaye and was still alive until 2018. You can read all about Mel and his family tree back to when his ancestors came to America at the link.
Apparently, the hack described in The Story of Mel is real too. The idea of that sort of bit twiddling, let alone optimizing your code for drum memory, is completely foreign to the current milieu but it did once exist and we can only marvel that it was once real.