To the Moon and back

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

http://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/don-eyles-walks-us-through-the-lunar-module-source-code/

[Will]

Very interesting! It's amazing how much they did with so little. Nobody's ever going to print out the source code for our first trip to Mars...

[kiek]

Very interesting indeed. It must have been full of bugs... It's a miracle that they made it back to Mother Earth.

[SwissCharles]

well the software did fail at the most crucial point  ... IIRC ...

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Actual source code digitized:
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/

Brilliant list of bug report comments:
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/issues/3

I wonder why this 'low-level assembly machine code' has such dense functionality that it feels like a script language.  Where did we go wrong?


Hoppie

[Will]

"This issue is fixed in Apollo 14."

Brilliant!!!

[Phil Bunch]

And then there is programming related to microcode!

I once had an older, very senior programmer inform me that "microcode programming is a young person's game."  This was back in the olden times when very labor-intensive efforts to improve machine and program efficiency were necessary.

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

"Shall we hire kids, Alsing?"

[Will]

ASofANM, good reference.

[cavaricooper]

I have found an unusually high number of ID10T errors in my coding

Brilliant, Ta!

C

[Hardy Heinlin]

Google and I don't know ASofANM, not even "AS of ANM" ...

[Will]

My error, it should have been TSofANM, not ASofANM. ;-)

[Hardy Heinlin]

Google still has no idea.

OK, I guess you first wrote "A Story of ...", and now "The Story of ..."

And ANM probably means Angélique Natalie Meilleroux.

[Will]

The Soul of a New Machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

THE book that got me into wanting to become an engineer (I thought I would, but then I knew).

My current environment has some striking similarities with the one described in the book, so I definitely got what I wished for.  We regularly cite quotes and half-pages to gauge ourselves against the real men.


Hoppie

[martin]

We regularly cite quotes

Let's see...

I wonder who lives in that big nest up there?

Cheers,
Martin
PS1 Ornithologist

[Will]

Anyone know The Eudaemonic Pie?

For anyone who is unfamiliar: "A virtual piñata of a book, which, when smashed by the readers enthusiastic attention, showers upon him everything from the history of useless roulette systems to the latest developments in chaos theory, said The New York Times. Richard Dawkins called it an astonishing and fascinating tale of scientific heroism. The Los Angeles Times said that Bass has done the best job so far of capturing the marriage of technical imagination and the communal coziness that gave birth to Silicon Valley."

Farther down the same pathway that The Soul of a New Machine started.

[jalexb88]

There is an open source simulation of the Apollo spacecraft which uses the Orbiter space simulator as the simulation platform and it integrates the actual AGC (Apollo guidance computer) emulation from Virtual AGC. You can fly Apollo 7 and 8 using the actual checklists and the authentic AGC software! (beta with more missions in the works)

These 2 programs are required (Orbiter & NASSP beta)

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

http://nassp.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page  (check the forums for the latest beta)

Alex

[DougSnow]

Fascinating - and why isnt that in a museum...?

[United744]

Orbiter is a great piece of software!

In the comments to the first article, is a listing of all the code used for multiple Apollo missions, along with scans of the original paper print-outs!

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/links.html#Software_manuals_and_listings