Monday, March 18, AD 2024 10:24pm

Apollo 11 Launches

Fifty years ago Apollo 11 launched.  The culmination of the American effort to make a manned landing on the moon by the end of the Sixties of the last century, Apollo 11 was an immensely expensive, approximately two hundred billion dollars in current dollars, and immensely daring project, constantly pushing the technology envelope.  The Apollo guidance computer that controlled the space craft had a whole whopping 2k of memory.  All of this was new and pioneering, the product of unending labor by an immense number of people, many of them quite unsung, something to recall as we track the mission of Apollo 11 over the coming days.

 

 

Margaret Hamilton, software engineer, in the above picture is standing by the software code she and her team developed for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Tuesday, July 16, AD 2019 7:28am

A little more geekiness. The code was written in BASIC, a descendent of which Microsoft still uses to program its MS Office applications.

https://www.geek.com/news/how-the-apollo-11s-1-024mhz-guidance-computer-did-a-lot-with-very-little-1562831/

OrdinaryCatholic
OrdinaryCatholic
Tuesday, July 16, AD 2019 9:20am

I would have thought by 1969 the code would have been written in C or Assembler. I don’t know if I would have risked my life on spaghetti code

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top