The story of Mel

Ed Nather tells the story of Mel, one of the saints of hackerdom (see The story of Mel or mel.txt for the story). This story has been reposted so many times. How may precious megabytes of the internet have been used sharing and re-sharing this story? We claim that the internet is a permanent place, where nothing can ever be removed. And while that is sometimes true—always in the most inconvenient cases—there is much internet content that’s been lost over time due to the ephemeral nature of information. Content once hosted in a niche of a web-hosting platform gets archived to make way for yet another online storefront. Servers go down as their administrators and maintainers change careers or academic institutions. Even the once reliable towel.blinkenlights.nl service has been retired!

The great tragedy of the internet isn’t that information lives on forever, it’s that important information dies a slow and quiet death. Fewer readers take the time to read old blogs, fewer visitors stop by the Star Wars site, and eventually those responsible for those services (rightly) stop expending time and resources to host that unaccessed content.

While I bemoan the loss of the great service of towel.blinkenlights.nl, the ASCII rendition of Star Wars is still alive and well, and played on terminals all over the internet. Projects like bhwang’s ascii-star-wars allow you to watch the movie in your local terminal, and Gabe Cook’s ascii-movie will even start a telnet and ssh server to run the movie. Allegedly, you can even still connect to the official telnet server at towel.blinkenlights.nl, rumor has it that it works over IPv6 but maybe not IPv4, though I’ve been unable to verify this.

I suppose the long story short here is that information can die unless independent contributors to the content of the internet keep it alive. So here is my small contribution to preserving the history of the internet and the lore that is the world of hackers: The Story of Mel. (Also available in plain text for those who care).

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

~ Dr. Seuss

The death of information

The Story of Mel is a great example of the death—or rather, the eternal life—of information. When Ed Nather originally posted his thoughts on this brilliant programmer, I highly doubt that he anticipated it would go on to be reposted, re-hosted, and dropped onto the blogs of every single hacker ever to contribute to the content of the internet.

There are two quotes that I think perfectly describe the nature of information:

Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn’t do is die. It has to be killed.

~ Arthur Miller

On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.

~ Stewart Brand, responding to Steve Wozniak

It is this interplay between these two concepts—that data (or information) refuses to die, and information is getting easier to store, process, and transmit—which describes the nature of information. But what is information? Or as you might hear a stoner ask, “dude, like, what even is data?”

The nature of information

A not entirely useless question: “What is data?” There have been entire epistemological treatises written on the topic, and we won’t go too deeply into those here, but briefly:

In Greek mythology, the Muses—goddesses of inspiration—are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. While I don’t put any stock in the exact details of Hellenistic paganism, I do believe that as proper fiction, they do describe the nature of reality through the lens of a story. Inspiration strikes us not out of nowhere, not randomly, but because of our memory. You don’t see physicists suddenly inspired with a fully-formed understanding of the genealogy of polar bears. But a philosopher who spends his entire life reading Aquinas? Odds are pretty good that his next big idea is going to be something along the lines of “to do good is to do right by God”.

Ideas, then, are the manifestation of the consequences of memory. What you know doesn’t merely get squished into your brain for later retrieval; what you know helps shape what you discover, how you think, and what you do. A man without a well-formed education is hardly a man at all, but a plastic bag, drifting through the wind. I think that’s a combination of Socrates and Katy Perry, and I’ve no doubt they both hate that sentence.

So our ideas—shaped by our experience and imagination become words—images, code. Before the internet, ideas still existed; information was still generated, transmitted, and processed. This, of course, didn’t happen in 1s and 0s, but through ink and paper, oil and canvas, and the oral tradition. The internet hasn’t actually changed the nature of information, though it has radically changed how it spreads—and how we approach the preservation of our ideas.

Must all ideas be preserved?

In the time of Aristotle, resources were scarce, and this scarcity demanded that disseminated information was not only true, but worth disseminating. Socrates, in a lifetime, wrote less than BuzzFeed slops out before lunch; yet Socrates manages to say more in one sentence than BuzzFeed’s entire staff could possibly hope to say with their entire catalog.

Not every idea deserves immortality. “The sky is green” doesn’t warrant eternal preservation in all our minds. Other ideas are worth preserving despite their perceived unpopularity. These ideas challenge, sharpen, and expand our thoughts. There is a debate worth having here over which ideas are worth preserving, and also a philosophical question of whether it’s even possible to forget an idea.

Content is disposable. Ideas, well-formed and well-communicated, are worth preserving.

But content is another matter entirely. Almost all of the internet is useless SEO/BuzzFeed slop. The advent of AI is doing nothing to help this dangerous new trend. There will come a day very soon in which the only content on the internet is just AI bots messaging AI bots and no human can get a word in edgewise. But even before AI, the slop was everywhere. BuzzFeed as a whole has never once produced any worthwhile content, and when it finally disappears into the forgotten depths, I promise not one tear will be shed. Not all content is worth preserving.

Content is disposable. But ideas, well-formed and well communicated, are absolutely worth preserving. And we do this in a few ways. Primarily, we do this by simply passing ideas along through education. A teacher says “2+2=4” and a class repeats it. Elegant, I suppose, in its simplicity. But big ideas can’t simply be memorized and repeated. Discussing the nature of God and Humanity demands more than a mere repetition of facts, it requires discussion, debate, treatises. These records, these treatises, these debates are worth preserving. Even the mundane details—like the historical record of events, who lived, who died, what they did, and when-are worth preserving. History is worth preserving. Not for ourselves, but for everyone who comes after us.

Timeless writings demand to be preserved—not because content insists on being saved—but because the prose with which an idea is carried deserves it.

The preservation of ideas

So why do I publish The Story of Mel here on my little corner of the internet? Because it’s a story worth telling. It’s well written: Ed Nather is both well educated and a skilled writer. But more importantly, he captured something eternal. The greatest Real Programmers aren’t the ones who just follow the instruction manual, and do what the documentation says. “Real Programmers can make machines do things that were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so.” (Jargon File)

You might ask “why are you republishing this story? It’s already available in the Jargon File, and it’ll probably be available in the Internet Archive forever.” Maybe so. But maybe not. The Internet Archive might lose funding tomorrow. I know my little site won’t last forever. But for as long as I’m here, for as long as I’m able, The Story of Mel will be here (also in plain text) for anyone else wishing to preserve this small story of one incredible programmer, and with it, a piece of the hacker culture that deserves to live for as long as there are still programmers out there to tell it.