8 ms·

“Houston, We've Had a Problem” (1975)

118 points by skbohra123 11y ago

tantalor 11y ago
Do people put these background patterns behind text expressly to hamper legibility?
- mholt 11y ago
  First thing I did was open inspector tools and delete that background attribute. Yes, it's an attribute - not a CSS property. We're talkin' early space age stuff here, remember.
  - oaktowner 11y ago
    There was a year or two where virtually the entire internet had flat gray backgrounds. Those textured gray ones were a fancy new addition. I'm old.
- im3w1l 11y ago
  According to a comment in the source, the page seems to be from 2001, when people didn't know better. Also look at that tell-tale footer!
  - gpvos 11y ago
    That footer is really 1995 style.
  - makeitsuckless 11y ago
    > "when people didn't know better" My god, what do you think 2001 was, the stone age?
    - tajen 11y ago
      When i hear "the startup bubble of 2001", I always take a moment to imagine what was a startup in 2001. I imagine an HTML 2 page with no Javascript and an ad banner at the top, inlined styles and <blink> tags... Like Altavista or Yahoo. So in truth, what were webpages before 2006?
      - alrs 11y ago
        Wired, ca. 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216025755/http://www.wired.com/news https://web.archive.org/web/20011216025755/http://www.wired....
      - ColinWright 11y ago
        My site is still pretty much as I originally had it in the mid to late 1990s: http://www.solipsys.co.uk http://www.solipsys.co.uk Didn't know better then, don't know better now. Still prefer content over style.
        keithpeter 11y ago
        http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/DistanceToTheMoon.html http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/DistanceToTheMoon.html OK, I'm intrigued and will be thinking about that one when I'm getting my students into their exam on Monday... http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/ http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/ 1992 style. See html comments for the reasons...
        ams6110 11y ago
        I still see a lot of web pages like that among computer science academics, especially those who are of "pre-internet" generations. E.g http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/
      - frik 11y ago
        Enter your favorite web sites URL at the Way Back Internet Archive: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/ There were different web design trends, from my subjective perspective: * 1991-1995 the early web with all sort of experiments, * 1995-2000 What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get era 8Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/etc) with Frames and Table-based layout and quite interesting design decisions, Java-applets, every website looked different often with very nice artworks and designs * 2000-2005 no frames more CSS less graphical too much content on each page, Flash and various other embedded plugins, XML and XHTML 1 were hot * 2005-2010 usage of AJAX, upcoming JSON * 2010-today leaner design, less is more, inspired by the Google startpage and styled after recent operating system themes from iOS/Windows8/Android5, HTML5, JS5, CSS3, heavy usage of AJAX on some sites (one page apps), responsive design (work on different screen resolutions) The web design was most colorful and interesting in the early days til about 2000. Then came the more boring years with cooperate designs and pages with too much content stuffed on one page. It got a lot more interesting from the design point of view though some of the flat-designs mean developer-art which isn't everyone likes.
  - larrymcp 11y ago
    A few more years from now, people are going to ask about web pages from 2015: "why did everybody's blog have light grey text on a white background everywhere? They must have had excellent visual acuity back in 2015"
- srathi 11y ago
  I use the following bookmarklet for this purpose. [1] [1] https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors
- exDM69 11y ago
  Because a pattern like that looks quite alright with a contemporary 800x600 resolution 15" CRT monitor, probably a lot more pleasant than black text on plain white background.
  - Nomentatus 11y ago
    Nope, I was bitching about those *I#$@! backgrounds way back then. It was part fashion and part narcissism: "Look ma, what I can do. I'm a real programmer!"
perfTerm 11y ago
I didn't particularly notice the background pattern but cycling through that story was really a great read. To put yourself in those shoes really had me going. Absolutely amazing what these young men did.
progers7 11y ago
If you enjoyed this story, I recommend "The Martian" by Andy Weir. It reads like it was written by an engineer (it was) and is a thoroughly researched, fun read.
tdicola 11y ago
Although 13 was quite a near-disaster, I'm surprised that there isn't just as much attention to how much 11 very nearly was a disaster too. During 11's descent to the moon the LEM's computer was overloaded and started throwing alarms. In addition Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin realized the craft overshot its intended landing spot and was heading for a field of rocks and boulders where landing would be impossible. What saved them is Neil taking manual control of the LEM, finding a smooth landing spot, and touching down the LEM with only seconds of fuel to spare. Neil's landing is in my mind just as amazing as the recovery of 13. There was no way Neil could have really prepared for a manual landing in the low gravity of the moon. In fact when they tried to test it on Earth, it very nearly killed him (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDI8SQ2fmLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDI8SQ2fmLA). It was purely Armstrong's intelligence and attitude under pressure that got 11 on the moon safely. And if you learn more about Armstrong you'll see it was no fluke how he performed on 11's landing. When testing the X-15 rocket plane he lost control and skipped off the top of the atmosphere but was still able to save the flight. Or during Gemini 8 when a thruster got stuck he aborted the docking attempt and fired the re-entry thruster to regain control (all of this while the craft was spinning more than once a second! http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/neil-armstrong-at-the-helm-120730.htm http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/neil-armstr...). There's a great write-up here with more details on his amazing performances under pressure: http://www.wired.com/2012/08/neil-armstrong_test-pliot/ http://www.wired.com/2012/08/neil-armstrong_test-pliot/ Without Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 very likely would have ended with Richard Nixon reading this somber message to a devastated nation: http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech.html http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech...
- venomsnake 11y ago
  I have read the selection process that was described in Lost Moon (the book of appolo 13). The NASA were literally recruiting superhumans back then. The smartest, healthiest, toughest and on on ... So I am not at all surprised that he managed to pull it off. https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/18/hans-solo-and-bayesian-priors https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/18/hans-solo-and-ba...
  - 11y ago
ColinWright 11y ago
I was honored to have dinner with Ken Mattingly a couple of years ago, and am looking forward to meeting Jim Lovell later this year. I've now met and talked with five Apollo era astronauts, and they are genuinely amazing. True gentlemen with wonderful stories, and self-deprecating. All amazingly skillful with hundreds of thousands of hours of technical training. And all different in their own way - all individuals. And all slightly embarrassed because they were just doing their jobs, and little or no credit is given to the hundreds of thousands of people on the ground who did their jobs and made it possible.
- dalke 11y ago
  "And Houston, as I step off at the surface at Taurus- Littrow, I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible." - Gene Cernan
- keithpeter 11y ago
  Anyone read Andrew Smith's Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth? Perhaps more about Mr Smith than the Apollo missions (sort of gonzo style journalistic account of his search for the Apollo astronauts) but interesting.
uniqueusername 11y ago
asdasdf
rzzzt 11y ago
There's a very nicely presented transcript of this mission (and others) on spacelog. http://apollo13.spacelog.org/ http://apollo13.spacelog.org/
peeters 11y ago
> Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, "Did you have suicide pills on board?" I would have to imagine that if the circumstances made it obvious that returning to Earth was impossible, the astronauts probably would have chosen to end their days on the surface of the moon. Assuming the LM could land with three on board.
- mjgoins 11y ago
  Unless they cared about preserving the state of the moon for future scientists without leaving human corpses lying around.
  - Symmetry 11y ago
    The astronauts left an awful lot of stuff on the moon but luckily the moon is a big place - a few people entombed there in the lander wouldn't make any difference.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Buzz Aldrin was asked how he would spend his last hours alive on the moon if the ascent engine had failed to light and left them stranded. His reply was that he would spend that time trying to fix the engine. I don't think they ever would have given up like that. You keep trying things to save it until you're dead, even if it's obvious that you're not going to make it.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    To me, it's more important to realize that you're never not going to make it. You're either trying to make it or you've already failed.
FlannelPancake 11y ago
> With the wisdom of hindsight, I should have said, "Hold it. Wait a second. I'm riding on this spacecraft. Just go out and replace that tank." That's crazy. I didn't realize the tank was acting funny before they even took off. To me, the risk-adverse non-astronaut, that seems like something that would've triggered big ominous "DANGER" signs going off in my head. I guess that's the benefit of hindsight, though.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  Anything that complex always will have things acting funny.
  - FlannelPancake 11y ago
    Heh, that's fair.
Nomentatus 11y ago
The Apollo 13 explosion turned out to be a magnificent example of "false redundancy". By packing the three (supposedly redundant) fuel cells tightly together, NASA actually tripled the chance of losing all power. They now had three fuses that might be the wrong wattage. (As I remember what I've read, someone got but never read a memo that the fuse wattage had been changed in the fuel cell design - the memo was found speared with many others in an unread pile after the accident.) Reading the details of Musk's designs his team really does seem to understand what redundancy is and is not. It's all too easy to get wrong.

118 points by skbohra123 11y ago

tantalor 11y ago

Do people put these background patterns behind text expressly to hamper legibility?

mholt 11y ago
First thing I did was open inspector tools and delete that background attribute. Yes, it's an attribute - not a CSS property. We're talkin' early space age stuff here, remember.
- oaktowner 11y ago
  There was a year or two where virtually the entire internet had flat gray backgrounds. Those textured gray ones were a fancy new addition. I'm old.
im3w1l 11y ago
According to a comment in the source, the page seems to be from 2001, when people didn't know better. Also look at that tell-tale footer!
- gpvos 11y ago
  That footer is really 1995 style.
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  > "when people didn't know better" My god, what do you think 2001 was, the stone age?
  - tajen 11y ago
    When i hear "the startup bubble of 2001", I always take a moment to imagine what was a startup in 2001. I imagine an HTML 2 page with no Javascript and an ad banner at the top, inlined styles and <blink> tags... Like Altavista or Yahoo. So in truth, what were webpages before 2006?
    - alrs 11y ago
      Wired, ca. 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011216025755/http://www.wired.com/news https://web.archive.org/web/20011216025755/http://www.wired....
    - ColinWright 11y ago
      My site is still pretty much as I originally had it in the mid to late 1990s: http://www.solipsys.co.uk http://www.solipsys.co.uk Didn't know better then, don't know better now. Still prefer content over style.
      - keithpeter 11y ago
        http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/DistanceToTheMoon.html http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/DistanceToTheMoon.html OK, I'm intrigued and will be thinking about that one when I'm getting my students into their exam on Monday... http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/ http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/ 1992 style. See html comments for the reasons...
        ams6110 11y ago
        I still see a lot of web pages like that among computer science academics, especially those who are of "pre-internet" generations. E.g http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/ http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/
    - frik 11y ago
      Enter your favorite web sites URL at the Way Back Internet Archive: https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/ There were different web design trends, from my subjective perspective: * 1991-1995 the early web with all sort of experiments, * 1995-2000 What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get era 8Frontpage/Dreamweaver/GoLive/etc) with Frames and Table-based layout and quite interesting design decisions, Java-applets, every website looked different often with very nice artworks and designs * 2000-2005 no frames more CSS less graphical too much content on each page, Flash and various other embedded plugins, XML and XHTML 1 were hot * 2005-2010 usage of AJAX, upcoming JSON * 2010-today leaner design, less is more, inspired by the Google startpage and styled after recent operating system themes from iOS/Windows8/Android5, HTML5, JS5, CSS3, heavy usage of AJAX on some sites (one page apps), responsive design (work on different screen resolutions) The web design was most colorful and interesting in the early days til about 2000. Then came the more boring years with cooperate designs and pages with too much content stuffed on one page. It got a lot more interesting from the design point of view though some of the flat-designs mean developer-art which isn't everyone likes.
- larrymcp 11y ago
  A few more years from now, people are going to ask about web pages from 2015: "why did everybody's blog have light grey text on a white background everywhere? They must have had excellent visual acuity back in 2015"
srathi 11y ago
I use the following bookmarklet for this purpose. [1] [1] https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors
exDM69 11y ago
Because a pattern like that looks quite alright with a contemporary 800x600 resolution 15" CRT monitor, probably a lot more pleasant than black text on plain white background.
- Nomentatus 11y ago
  Nope, I was bitching about those *I#$@! backgrounds way back then. It was part fashion and part narcissism: "Look ma, what I can do. I'm a real programmer!"

perfTerm 11y ago

I didn't particularly notice the background pattern but cycling through that story was really a great read. To put yourself in those shoes really had me going. Absolutely amazing what these young men did.

progers7 11y ago

If you enjoyed this story, I recommend "The Martian" by Andy Weir. It reads like it was written by an engineer (it was) and is a thoroughly researched, fun read.

tdicola 11y ago

Although 13 was quite a near-disaster, I'm surprised that there isn't just as much attention to how much 11 very nearly was a disaster too. During 11's descent to the moon the LEM's computer was overloaded and started throwing alarms. In addition Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin realized the craft overshot its intended landing spot and was heading for a field of rocks and boulders where landing would be impossible. What saved them is Neil taking manual control of the LEM, finding a smooth landing spot, and touching down the LEM with only seconds of fuel to spare. Neil's landing is in my mind just as amazing as the recovery of 13. There was no way Neil could have really prepared for a manual landing in the low gravity of the moon. In fact when they tried to test it on Earth, it very nearly killed him (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDI8SQ2fmLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDI8SQ2fmLA). It was purely Armstrong's intelligence and attitude under pressure that got 11 on the moon safely. And if you learn more about Armstrong you'll see it was no fluke how he performed on 11's landing. When testing the X-15 rocket plane he lost control and skipped off the top of the atmosphere but was still able to save the flight. Or during Gemini 8 when a thruster got stuck he aborted the docking attempt and fired the re-entry thruster to regain control (all of this while the craft was spinning more than once a second! http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/neil-armstrong-at-the-helm-120730.htm http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/neil-armstr...). There's a great write-up here with more details on his amazing performances under pressure: http://www.wired.com/2012/08/neil-armstrong_test-pliot/ http://www.wired.com/2012/08/neil-armstrong_test-pliot/ Without Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 very likely would have ended with Richard Nixon reading this somber message to a devastated nation: http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech.html http://watergate.info/1969/07/20/an-undelivered-nixon-speech...

venomsnake 11y ago
I have read the selection process that was described in Lost Moon (the book of appolo 13). The NASA were literally recruiting superhumans back then. The smartest, healthiest, toughest and on on ... So I am not at all surprised that he managed to pull it off. https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/18/hans-solo-and-bayesian-priors https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2015/2/18/hans-solo-and-ba...
- 11y ago

ColinWright 11y ago

I was honored to have dinner with Ken Mattingly a couple of years ago, and am looking forward to meeting Jim Lovell later this year. I've now met and talked with five Apollo era astronauts, and they are genuinely amazing. True gentlemen with wonderful stories, and self-deprecating. All amazingly skillful with hundreds of thousands of hours of technical training. And all different in their own way - all individuals. And all slightly embarrassed because they were just doing their jobs, and little or no credit is given to the hundreds of thousands of people on the ground who did their jobs and made it possible.

dalke 11y ago
"And Houston, as I step off at the surface at Taurus- Littrow, I'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible." - Gene Cernan
keithpeter 11y ago
Anyone read Andrew Smith's Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth? Perhaps more about Mr Smith than the Apollo missions (sort of gonzo style journalistic account of his search for the Apollo astronauts) but interesting.

uniqueusername 11y ago

asdasdf

rzzzt 11y ago

There's a very nicely presented transcript of this mission (and others) on spacelog. http://apollo13.spacelog.org/ http://apollo13.spacelog.org/

peeters 11y ago

> Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, "Did you have suicide pills on board?" I would have to imagine that if the circumstances made it obvious that returning to Earth was impossible, the astronauts probably would have chosen to end their days on the surface of the moon. Assuming the LM could land with three on board.

mjgoins 11y ago
Unless they cared about preserving the state of the moon for future scientists without leaving human corpses lying around.
- Symmetry 11y ago
  The astronauts left an awful lot of stuff on the moon but luckily the moon is a big place - a few people entombed there in the lander wouldn't make any difference.
mikeash 11y ago
Buzz Aldrin was asked how he would spend his last hours alive on the moon if the ascent engine had failed to light and left them stranded. His reply was that he would spend that time trying to fix the engine. I don't think they ever would have given up like that. You keep trying things to save it until you're dead, even if it's obvious that you're not going to make it.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  To me, it's more important to realize that you're never not going to make it. You're either trying to make it or you've already failed.

FlannelPancake 11y ago

> With the wisdom of hindsight, I should have said, "Hold it. Wait a second. I'm riding on this spacecraft. Just go out and replace that tank." That's crazy. I didn't realize the tank was acting funny before they even took off. To me, the risk-adverse non-astronaut, that seems like something that would've triggered big ominous "DANGER" signs going off in my head. I guess that's the benefit of hindsight, though.

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
Anything that complex always will have things acting funny.
- FlannelPancake 11y ago
  Heh, that's fair.

Nomentatus 11y ago

The Apollo 13 explosion turned out to be a magnificent example of "false redundancy". By packing the three (supposedly redundant) fuel cells tightly together, NASA actually tripled the chance of losing all power. They now had three fuses that might be the wrong wattage. (As I remember what I've read, someone got but never read a memo that the fuse wattage had been changed in the fuel cell design - the memo was found speared with many others in an unread pile after the accident.) Reading the details of Musk's designs his team really does seem to understand what redundancy is and is not. It's all too easy to get wrong.