Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer

ibiblio.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer

#11

Post by ejr »

spain wrote: post #8

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Comanche055/PINBALL_G... >Filename: PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.agc Can someone explain what this is? I doubt they had an actual game of pinball in their guidance computer.

Seems to have been part of the user interface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Softw...

  A set of interrupt-driven user interface routines called Pinball provided keyboard and 
  display services for the jobs and tasks running on the AGC. A rich set of user-accessible 
  routines were provided to let the operator (astronaut) display the contents of various 
  memory locations in octal or decimal in groups of 1, 2, or 3 registers at a time. 
  Monitor routines were provided so the operator could initiate a task to 
  periodically redisplay the contents of certain memory locations. Jobs could be 
  initiated. The Pinball routines performed the (very rough) equivalent of the 
  UNIX shell.

Re: Source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer

#13

Post by VLM »

spain wrote: post #8

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Comanche055/PINBALL_G... >Filename: PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.agc Can someone explain what this is? I doubt they had an actual game of pinball in their guidance computer.

Reading some of the comments its a reasonably close analogy WRT the UI where its not allowed to go to sleep while it's still got something to say or think about. So the buttons and lights of a pinball machine keep flashing while there is at least one ball in play.

This is well commented code, for assembly.

Re: Source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer

#14

Post by spain »

egoebelbecker wrote: post #9
spain wrote: post #8

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Comanche055/PINBALL_G... >Filename: PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.agc Can someone explain what this is? I doubt they had an actual game of pinball in their guidance computer.

It appears to be the code for the controls: # THE KEYBOARD AND DISPLAY SYSTEM PROGRAM OPERATES UNDER EXECUTIVE # CONTROL AND PROCESSES INFORMATION EXCHANGED BETWEEN THE AGC AND THE # COMPUTER OPERATOR. THE INPUTS TO THE PROGRAM ARE FROM THE KEYBOARD, # FROM INTERNAL PROGRAM, AND FROM THE UPLINK. I think it's just someone with a sense of humor.

>I think it's just someone with a sense of humor.

Yeah I think that's the only explanation for it literally saying "GAME".

Re: Source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer

#19

Post by ejr »

VLM wrote: post #13
spain wrote: post #8

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Comanche055/PINBALL_G... >Filename: PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.agc Can someone explain what this is? I doubt they had an actual game of pinball in their guidance computer.

Reading some of the comments its a reasonably close analogy WRT the UI where its not allowed to go to sleep while it's still got something to say or think about. So the buttons and lights of a pinball machine keep flashing while there is at least one ball in play. This is well commented code, for assembly.

The difference between a haphazard device driver, a bootloader by a ragtag group of hackers and a space capsule is national pride and lives at stake. ;-)

We should encourage software to be written as if it will one day fly in space.

Post reply on HN