Hal Laning really has been neglected. This is the first place I have seen his work mentioned in public. He did the compiler for Whirlwind, the first actual comp

Hal Laning really has been neglected. This is the first place I have seen his work mentioned in public. He did the compiler for Whirlwind, the first actual compiler ever. Knuth notes here it compiled to a series of subroutine calls. Hal gets first credit on the Apollo 11 moon landing not failing when operator error (a switch in wrong position, missed on the pre-landing checklist), causing the program to be unable to complete all its work on schedule, failed "soft" without losing control of the spacecraft. On each fault, it rebooted and resumed the high-priority processes with all of their important state preserved. Don Eyles, who coded most of the actual landing process, explains in detail in his book "Sunburst and Luminary". Recommended. (People often give Margaret Hamilton credit for this, but her involvement came after this work was done.) http://www.sunburstandluminary.com http://www.sunburstandluminary.com Hal died in 2012, passed over for a Turing award, decade after decade.