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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday September 06 2016, @10:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the it'll-run-on-a-pocket-calculator dept.

Quartz reports that a former NASA intern has made a Github repository for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer code.

The AGC code has been available to the public for quite a while–it was first uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003, after he'd transcribed it from scanned images of the original hardcopies MIT had put online. That is, he manually typed out each line, one by one.

"It was scanned by a airplane pilot named Gary Neff in Colorado," Burkey said in an email. "MIT got hold of the scans and put them online in the form of page images, which unfortunately had been mutilated in the process to the point of being unreadable in places." Burkey reconstructed the unreadable parts, he said, using his engineering skills to fill in the blanks.

"Quite a bit later, I managed to get some replacement scans from Gary Neff for the unreadable parts and fortunately found out that the parts I filled in were 100% correct!" he said.

The effort made the code available to any researcher or hobbyist who wanted to explore it. Burkey himself even used the software to create a simulation of the AGC: [link to YouTube video embedded in original story]

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.

[Continues...]

There are some funny comments in the code, which the Quartz story mentions. This one appears to have been added in 2009, and explains the naming of the file BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc:

## At the get-together of the AGC developers celebrating the 40th anniversary
## of the first moonwalk, Don Eyles (one of the authors of this routine along
## with Peter Adler) has related to us a little interesting history behind the
## naming of the routine.
##
## It traces back to 1965 and the Los Angeles riots, and was inspired
## by disc jockey extraordinaire and radio station owner Magnificent Montague.
## Magnificent Montague used the phrase "Burn, baby! BURN!" when spinning the
## hottest new records. Magnificent Montague was the charismatic voice of
## soul music in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles from the mid-1950s to
## the mid-1960s.

Other comments, such as these two from the file LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.agc, are clearly a bit older:


                TC BANKCALL# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE
                CADR STOPRATE# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE

Related: World's First Integrated Circuit Microcomputer Found


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06 2016, @04:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06 2016, @04:42PM (#398189)

    WTF? You babble with words

    You need to understand that

    whatever head trauma you apparently suffered

    Wow someone's angry. What happened, someone took your favorite ball away from you?

    Don't you worry, I will replace it with a plane!

    But in the meantime, go tie your knots someplace else, and quit your trolling bigotry- I am trying to have a civilized conversation here.

    Off with you!