Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 07 2016, @12:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 07 2016, @12:18AM (#398406)

    I strongly disagree with your moon arguments and data and have several counterpoints, but this is getting a very long discussion already and I have other matters to attend to. I am not deflecting you and I will try to pick this up at a later time.

    I now understand what you mean.

    Good!

    At what date, time, and location did you see an illuminated ISS when you should not have been able to?

    I am sorry, but I cannot give you my location. As soon as this stops being an issue for me, you can have my home address for what I care, topped with an open invitation to come over and help out or even oversee experiments.

    What I can give you is a tip that you can get predictions from the isstracker dot com website. Use a future date, and see where the 'ISS' is to show up. Its inclination is such that if you live further north than London it will never pass directly over you, so you are out of luck. Otherwise, it is just a matter of time before it passes overhead from a place near you while you are several hours after sunset, and it should be trivial for you to find an appropriate location and time to that end.

    PS: Only if you feel "sufficiently motivated", of course. Nobody is forcing anything on anybody.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday September 07 2016, @07:36AM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Wednesday September 07 2016, @07:36AM (#398609) Homepage

    What I can give you is a tip that you can get predictions from the isstracker dot com website.

    Who are presumably part of the flat Earth conspiracy themselves, since their calculations wouldn't make sense otherwise.

    Otherwise, it is just a matter of time before it passes overhead from a place near you while you are several hours after sunset, and it should be trivial for you to find an appropriate location and time to that end.

    I've seen it, several times. I've also seen it fade as it enters the Earth's shadow. I guess they didn't forget to turn the lights off that time.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 07 2016, @01:21PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 07 2016, @01:21PM (#398673) Journal

    Otherwise, it is just a matter of time before it passes overhead from a place near you while you are several hours after sunset, and it should be trivial for you to find an appropriate location and time to that end.

    You need more than that. You need to know when the ISS will be in sunlight and when it won't. Several hours after sunset is not that far away from sunset at the higher latitudes, particularly in summer (for whichever hemisphere you are observing from). For example, 22 degrees of rotation is not 22 degrees of separation at 45 degrees latitude (which is my latitude incidentally). Rather it is about 15 degrees of separation (divide by square root of two) due to the lesser movement of rotation at the latitude (you're closer to the axis of rotation and don't move as far). The most extreme case would be at the pole where you rotate as much as you'd like, but it won't change the apparent elevation of the Sun because you aren't actually moving anywhere.

    Also, let us note that it is completely irrelevant to the discussion of the supposedly fake Moon landings whether the ISS glows or not.

    Its inclination is such that if you live further north than London it will never pass directly over you, so you are out of luck.

    Inclination? You blew off a bunch of physics and geometry earlier in the thread when it didn't suit you. But now the ISS has some parameter called "inclination" which actually matters. The same math and physics which can tell you very precisely where the ISS will be, is the same math and physics that tells us the Moon is something we can walk on.