It is definitely in the spirit of the story of Mel, since Tom was exploiting an intimate knowledge of the machine to achieve the impossible by using instructions in unintended ways, but always remember that Tom is not a real programmer:

  Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
  Not FORTRAN.  Not RATFOR.  Not, even, assembly language.
  Machine Code.
  Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
  Directly.

That said, I prefer Tom's story. It's more about the joy of understanding the machine than it is about the framing of a legend.