Here's a fun article I came across, some excerpts below:
"When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.
They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code."
"As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, the code-sharing site where millions of programmers hang out these days.
Within hours, coders began dissecting the software, particularly looking at the code comments the AGC’s original programmers had written. In programming, comments are plain-English descriptions of what task is being performed at a given point. But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references."
"Now that the code is on GitHub, programmers can actually suggest changes and file issues. And, of course, they have. One developer submitted an issue saying, “A customer has had a fairly serious problem with stirring the cryogenic tanks with a circuit fault present,” and listed steps to reproduce the problem. “Be aware that this may be hazardous to the tester attempting it,” he added. The responses flooded in."
Full article: http://qz.com/726338/the-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon-was-just-published-to-github-and-its-like-a-1960s-time-capsule/
It's great that they've uploaded the code to Github, I fully support the internet acting as a public museum of sorts.
Crazy to see how code was written back then, I myself have never had to write a line of assembly code and I hope it stays that way.
Could be interesting to conduct a thorough review on the Apollo code, perhaps there were fatal bugs that just, by coincidence, never happened?
It's fun to read through the list of "issues" that people have submitted in jest, here are some of my favorites:
"please remove all references to "burning babies" in BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.s , it is hurtful and I do not think it is good for our image"
"I see many requests to rewrite this program in different languages. However, the most popular language is still missing. Please, use Chinese."
"The issue tracker for this repository should be disabled. -- I agree. These issues are getting ridiculous. I say we launch the thing and just test it in production."
