Apollo 11 Guidance Computer's Code Now on Github

[Buster's Uncle]

Apollo 11 Guidance Computer's Code Now on Github
The code shows NASA engineers of the 1960s had a corny sense of humor.
PCMag India
By Tom Brant   July 12, 2016, 5:20 a.m.



A former NASA intern uploaded the source code for the computer that guided the Apollo 11 moon landing to Github last week, where coders with a bit of time on their hands combed through it to resurrect the humor of the programmers who worked for the space agency in the 1960s.

The master ignition routine, for instance, is called "burn_baby_burn," a reference to the Los Angeles riots of 1965, according to the notes that accompany the uploaded files.

The files themselves have long been part of the public domain and were digitized at MIT for storage in the MIT Museum's collection. But they remained relatively obscure until last week, when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to the GitHub code sharing site, according to Quartz.

Some of the humor is brief, like the names of routines, which in addition to "burn_baby_burn" include the "trashy little subroutines" section of the lunar landing guidance equations file. Other humorous parts are more poetic, including a quotation from Shakespeare: "It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear."

According to one Reddit user, that excerpt from Henry VI could have referred to how commands were entered into the guidance computer. The computer used a system of "verbs," which described the type of action to be performed, and "nouns," which specified the data affected by the verb command.

The Apollo guidance computer code is not the only part of the first lunar landing mission to resurface in recent years. After Neil Armstrong died in 2012, his family discovered a temporary stowage bag, which contained a 16mm camera used to film the late astronaut's famous first steps on the lunar surface, two waist tethers intended for emergency spacewalks, and more.

The odds and ends were intended to be left with the landing module, but Armstrong apparently took them back to Earth on the return spaceflight.


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[E_T]

One thing that I always like to remind the average younger generation, the ones whom have their noses stuck in their average smartphone facebook and text message existances, is this very real and true fact...  That their smartphone, that sits so well in their hands, is more powerful a compution device than what was present in the rockets that took us to the moon....