It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

Speaking of fireside stories, this is a classic 1983 post called “The story of Mel, a real programmer”:

[…]
I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster — drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren’t here to stay, anyway.
(That’s why you haven’t heard of the company,
or the computer.)
[…]

I don’t super love this presentation/​style, but it’s an interesting “close to the metal” programming anecdote (similar in some ways to Duff’s device), and doubly interesting to try to go through the jargon and actually understand it all.

Not particularly relevant to the story itself, but this is LGP-30, launched in 1956:

I’ve known LGP-30 for a while – some of the photos people put in the Wikipedia entry are actually ones I took at the Computer History Museum – but I saw a running one only earlier this year at a computer museum in Stuttgart. I particularly loved the industrial, lit up buttons…

…and the “display” which was just an oscilloscope contorted to fit within a specific binary template:

As far as I know, RGP-4000 – the 1960’s successor – didn’t feel much different, so perhaps seeing these might actually enhance the spooky story.