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I worked at the MIT Instrumentation Lab on a compiler for the Apollo Guidance computer. The language was rather bizarre. Each line was encoded on 3 punched ca
by russell 15y ago
I worked at the MIT Instrumentation Lab on a compiler for the Apollo Guidance computer. The language was rather bizarre. Each line was encoded on 3 punched cards. One for the main expression, one for subscripts, and one for superscripts. I was pretty junior so my task was really at the front end processing compiler options and reading the input.
The Lab was a really interesting place. Lots of high end 360's, which couldnt even power a phone these days. We had our own command module mockup, but I was an employee of a contractor, so no-one would let me play around on the inside, but I did get to peek.
In the grand scheme of things, my role was miniscule, but I am still very proud that I was able to contribute to one of the greatest adventures of the last century.
- derrida 15y agoThat is really cool! What if the guidance computer operated with a bad parser? I imagine that could have been disastrous.
- russell 15y agoNot really a problem. All the software was rigorously tested using emulators running on mainframes. The Guidance computers were truly bizarre things. They used core memories for program storage, but to save weight only the 1 bits were expressed with cores. The 0 bits had none. If you recompiled a program and even one bit changed, the memory had to be re-manufactured. Therefore, lots of testing.
- rbanffy 15y ago> my role was miniscule, but I am still very proud Most individual roles tend to be minuscule, specially in such a huge endeavor. But you should be proud nevertheless - you and others like you made some of our greatest voyages of exploration possible. It will be very tragic if Mercury, Gemini and Apollo continue to be the best examples of space exploration done right. We need to do better and we need your shoulders to stand on.