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There is so much great stuff in this 2018 video. I am definitely going to buy the book. This is another of those things that reminds me (a hardware guy) of the importance of software (Sunburst and Luimary were the names of two programs that Eyles wrote to enable the LEM to land on the moon).
-- Asked about one of the biggest ancillary contributions of the Apollo program, Eyles immediately says, "integrated circuits." They used three terminal NOR gates. Lots of them.
-- They never had a hardware failure in the Apollo computers. Demonstrating a classic troubleshooting technique, when they discovered what they thought was a hardware failure, they ran the program on another computer. The problem was also there, so they knew there had been no failure on the first machine.
-- The LEM simulator was very cool.
-- Eyles' ability -- in two hours -- to write the code for the automatic landing program that Astronaut John Young was asking for, then have it flown on an Apollo mission to the moon was very impressive.
Thanks to the MIT Museum for posting Don's talk. And thanks to HackADay for alerting us to it.
Also, take a look at this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi4h04ZgQsQ
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I have a box of FORTRAN card decks that date back to the 70's when I was a coop student at MSFC (Marshall Center). There was a FORTRAN program being passed around that used the actual LEM weights and propulsion numbers to run a simulated LEM landing on a Sigma 930, which originally had been in one of the Jupiter C test bunkers. It had core memory, a line printer, and sense switches on the console, so the program required a pilot and co-pilot. The pilot flipped the sense switches (which were read by the FORTRAN program), and the co-pilot watched the landing curve on the line printer.
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