4 ms·

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

by kunai 11y ago

ginko 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
drglitch 11y ago
Back in the day, not everything needed jquery and bootstrap deps to be considered "modern" ;) Jokes aside, russian space program had some AMAZING developers working in some very low-level languages with unbelievable efficiency. I had the pleasure of working with some of them many years later on enterprise software at large banks. NASA has written some amazing software as well. Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063192
- Camillo 11y ago
  You may joke, but Node.js is still going strong after six years, while Buran never went past test flights. Imagine how much farther Buran could have gotten if they had the ability to share small, focused, reusable modules with the community. Imagine how much more reliable their systems could have been, if they had been able to reason about them at a higher level of abstraction, without getting bogged down into the low-level complexity of left-pad!
  - IgorPartola 11y ago
    I know you are being sarcastic, but remember that there was no community at that time. And besides, open source code would have meant that other countries would have gotten it. Also, check this out: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff Very different from how a typical Node.js left pad module is implemented.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    I get your meaning, but additional abstraction layers are equally dangerous because they obsfucate underlying constraints and result in incorrect reasoning about a system. There's a reason RTOSs don't have very tall software stacks with multiple layers and virtual machines between them and the hardware. When your garbage collector invoking at the wrong millisecond 0.01% of the time means everyone on the craft is incinerated in the atmosphere... that's a different level of reliability requirement.
    - paulddraper 11y ago
      You missed the sarcasm.
- klum 11y ago
  If you have some stories you can/would like to share, please do!
pjc50 11y ago
4MB is rather a lot for embedded applications, especially if they are written in assembler. I can't imagine having to hand-check 4MB of assembler for flight certification. Remember we had an entire game industry, graphical assets and all, distributed on 1.44MB floppy disks.
LarryMade2 11y ago
Given the time probably was all assembly, at the time four MB is quite a lot. Early on, many space data systems used wire core memory to reduce errors.
ghaff 11y ago
The Apollo Guidance Computer had about 64KB of memory. The first minicomputer that I was a product manager for in the mid-eighties had a max memory of 4MB. (In the latter case, not everything was written in assembler but it was all compiled.)

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

by kunai 11y ago

Jesus Christ, 4MB? Did they write the whole thing in machine code?

ginko 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON

drglitch 11y ago

Back in the day, not everything needed jquery and bootstrap deps to be considered "modern" ;) Jokes aside, russian space program had some AMAZING developers working in some very low-level languages with unbelievable efficiency. I had the pleasure of working with some of them many years later on enterprise software at large banks. NASA has written some amazing software as well. Start here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063192

Camillo 11y ago
You may joke, but Node.js is still going strong after six years, while Buran never went past test flights. Imagine how much farther Buran could have gotten if they had the ability to share small, focused, reusable modules with the community. Imagine how much more reliable their systems could have been, if they had been able to reason about them at a higher level of abstraction, without getting bogged down into the low-level complexity of left-pad!
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  I know you are being sarcastic, but remember that there was no community at that time. And besides, open source code would have meant that other countries would have gotten it. Also, check this out: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff Very different from how a typical Node.js left pad module is implemented.
- ethbro 11y ago
  I get your meaning, but additional abstraction layers are equally dangerous because they obsfucate underlying constraints and result in incorrect reasoning about a system. There's a reason RTOSs don't have very tall software stacks with multiple layers and virtual machines between them and the hardware. When your garbage collector invoking at the wrong millisecond 0.01% of the time means everyone on the craft is incinerated in the atmosphere... that's a different level of reliability requirement.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    You missed the sarcasm.
klum 11y ago
If you have some stories you can/would like to share, please do!

pjc50 11y ago

4MB is rather a lot for embedded applications, especially if they are written in assembler. I can't imagine having to hand-check 4MB of assembler for flight certification. Remember we had an entire game industry, graphical assets and all, distributed on 1.44MB floppy disks.

LarryMade2 11y ago

Given the time probably was all assembly, at the time four MB is quite a lot. Early on, many space data systems used wire core memory to reduce errors.

ghaff 11y ago

The Apollo Guidance Computer had about 64KB of memory. The first minicomputer that I was a product manager for in the mid-eighties had a max memory of 4MB. (In the latter case, not everything was written in assembler but it was all compiled.)