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Computer control of a machine for exploring Mars (1964) [pdf]
- abrax3141 9y agoFather of Lisp was also Grandfather of the Mars Rovers!
- meitham 9y agoHe probably forethought of controlling rovers while designing Lisp. Genius man.
- jacobush 9y agoAnd the name of the proposed rover was "Beagle"!
- _joel 9y agoUnfortunate name for a Mars rover, in the passage of time at least
- jacobush 9y agoMade me wonder if Beagle 2 was in fact inspired by that robotic thing from 1964...
- Steve44 9y agoI saw a TV programme about this last week, it was named after Charles Darwin’s ship - H.M.S. Beagle. A bit of interesting reading here http://www.beagle2.com/author/beagle2/ http://www.beagle2.com/author/beagle2/
- jacobush 9y agoYes, I know, but I mean maybe there was a hidden meaning to it.
- unixhero 9y agoIt's got some Carl Sagan in it. Very good find.
- phil9987 9y agoGreat vision from a great man.
- abrax3141 9y agoHey, HN Admins, is it really necessary to micro-manage the titles?! I had “by John McCarthy” (which is highly relevant, and in the next line in the doc)! It’s just a bit prissy to have to have the titles your favorite way all the time. Please stop it, and if you need to micromanage peoples posts, you should be working for Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah, I know ... OFF TOPIC!
- molteanu 9y agoOh, I wouldn't have opened the link if it wasn't for the John McCarthy mention.
- kazinator 9y agoIndeed; I read this specifically because I was curious specifically what MacCarthy's requirements or specifications would have been for such a thing, back in 1964. I.e. the young MacCarthy take on the problem and how it reveals his thinking about such a thing. What it reveals is that he had a very firm grasp on advanced computer and operating system architecture. He describes the requirements for an interrupt-driven concurrent system which has two levels of protection: a user and executive mode. Moreover, he recommends a small, well-debugged kernel be used, architected in such a way that errors in other pieces such as peripheral drivers, are recoverable. It's almost as if he's hinting at a micro-kernel architecture.
- ceejayoz 9y agoIIRC, it's automatic.
- manan_doshi 9y agoHow do they do it? Prune "By X" every time? Or is there a more sophisticated system?
- ceejayoz 9y agoThis seems to indicate some sort of cron just fetches the <title> tag a little while after something's posted and updates accordingly. Matches with my experience - I've seen perfectly good titles reverted to nonsensical garbage no admin would've manually reverted to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572910
- ballooney 9y agoOthers might also find this History of Lisp at JPL (used on both spacecraft and rovers) interesting: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
- emj 9y agoThe Automated Biological Laboratory https://archive.org/stream/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19660027176/#page/n343 https://archive.org/stream/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19660027176/#pa... In OPs link there is a committee that says "No pics from mars, it's too hard to do", and then there is John talking about it like it's obvious pictures needs to be taken..
- ape4 9y agoIs there a program that can take a LaTeX file and create a PDF that looks like a scanned type-written paper from 1964 ;)
- kazinator 9y agoI'm surprised he recommended a time interrupt of around 1000 Hz, for a machine with microsecond memory cycle times.
- drzaiusapelord 9y agoViking 1 landed on Mars only 12 years later. Interesting that a paper about exploring the possibility of a computerized machine on Mars is written a scant 12 years before an actual landing of a fairly complex lander. Life between, say, 1960 and 1980 must have felt at a breakneck pace. Viking 1 lander's abilities: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/viking1landata.html https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/viking1landata.html