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posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 01 2017, @07:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the open-mailbox dept.

Spotted at Andrew Plotkin's blog is an interesting article on the two word control panel in the original Apollo Guidance Computer, which talks about the use of "VERB" and "NOUN" controls on the original instrument panel.

This then links to a Discover Magazine Article How Verbs and Nouns Got Apollo to the Moon, which describes how the Apollo astronauts interacted with the guidance computer by:

[...] entering Noun-Verb combination commands in lieu of a string of written words. To keep it simple, the commands were written out in short hand. For example, V37N31E stood for Verb 37 Noun 31 and Enter to get the program running.

[...] It might not seem like it, but the Noun-Verb arrangement and verbiage comes from the fact that the computer engineers who built and used the Apollo guidance computer were also inventing it as they went along. They didn't have backgrounds in computer engineering because the field didn't exist then as it does today. But they all spoke English, so carrying over the same language structure simplified things for everyone. It's a perfect example of the brilliant simplicity that went into so much engineering of the Apollo era.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @09:18PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @09:18PM (#562730)

    That video is at its most convincing around 5:13. Perhaps you gave up on it before then.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday September 02 2017, @10:49AM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Saturday September 02 2017, @10:49AM (#562902) Homepage

    Do you mean 35:13? 5:13 is just rhetorical guff. I mean, the whole thing's rhetorical guff, but still.

    If you mean the Hubble comparison, that's just a load of old bollocks as well. "100 times more complicated" is meaningless journalised gibberish. Far, far more time and money was spent on Apollo than Hubble. I'm sure if they'd had a chance to do multiple test runs they could have got Hubble right on the "first time" as well.

    You might as well conclude that every successful mission must be a hoax, because sometimes missions don't go to plan.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk