“I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.”

(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…