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The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer - Brian Troutwine

Erlang Solutions · Youtube · 119 HN points · 4 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Erlang Solutions's video "The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer - Brian Troutwine".
Youtube Summary
See more space related talks by Brian Troutwine from EEF17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=pwoaJvrJE_U

Slides and more info: http://www.codemesh.io/codemesh2015/brian-troutwine

The Apollo Project was the first flight system to deploy with a digital, general-purpose computer at its core; the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). It was a complete research project: no digital computer had run consecutively for more than a few hours, sophisticated programming techniques were unknown and the human/computer interface had to be constructed to appeal to astronauts constitutionally opposed to machine interference in flight operations.

In this talk I'll give the historical context for the AGC, discuss its initial design and the evolution of this design as the Apollo Project progressed. We'll do a deep-dive on the machine architecture and note how tight integration with a special-purpose vehicle admitted incredibly sophisticated behaviour from a primitive machine. We'll further discuss the human/computer interface for the AGC, how the astronaut's flight roles dictated the computer's role and vice versa. Motivating examples from select Apollo flights will be used.

Throughout, we'll keep an eye on lessons to be gleaned from the experience of engineering the AGC and how we can adapt these lessons to modern computer systems in mission-critical deployments.

Talk objectives:

The intention of this talk is to describe the means and ways of what we now call embedded real-time software engineering in an engaging, historical context. Many of the techniques that are now dryly elaborated in textbooks were invented on the fly by engineers working on the Apollo Guidance Computer in the service of safely landing and retrieving men from the Moon. The audience is intended to learn:

* systematic exploration of critical problem domains

* embedded programming techniques for tiny computers

* historical approaches to computing machines

* the long-tail research that went into successful spaceflight to the moon

Target audience:

- General software engineers, people interested in spaceflight and critical systems engineers ought to enjoy the talk very much if all goes according to plan.


About Brian

Brian L. Troutwine is a software engineer with a focus on fault tolerance and real-time critical systems. He works extensively in Erlang and is a senior engineer with AdRoll on the real-time bidding project. Brian is likes things that go boom on failure.
HN Theater Rankings

Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
"The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer" is a wonderful talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY45YE7ggng

The AGC implemented a virtual machine to run higher-level computational routines. The whole architecture is really interesting.

⬐ rst
Eyles has a memoir out: info available here. (The title is "Sunburst and Luminary", which were the names for LM software builds for earth-orbit testing and lunar landings, respectively.)

http://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html

⬐
A not so inspiring talk about a very inspiring topic. A much better talk about the Apollo guidance computer was held at Code Mesh London 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY45YE7ggng

⬐ rootbear
The comments on Youtube for that video are not kind. I'll watch all of it later, but it seems to have some serious flaws. I enjoyed an older documentary on the AGC that was part of a series called Moon Machines. The episode on the AGC is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YA7X5we8ng

I was going to say much of the same, but I won't echo you.

I just recently watched this really interesting video from London Code Mesh 2015 on the Apollo Guidance Computer where the radar antenna-generated interrupts were discussed (among other interesting bugs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY45YE7ggng

⬐
Nov 07, 2015 · 119 points, 3 comments · submitted by DHJSH
⬐ 6502nerdface
If you like this, you may also like this book that goes into crazy detail about the design and architecture of the AGC:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architect...

See also Fran's pages; she does some reverse engineering with X ray micrographs:

http://www.frantone.com/designwritings/design_writings_LVDC....

⬐ diego898
Also of interest might be John Pultorak's DIY AGC[1]

[1]: http://www.galaxiki.org/web/main/_blog/all/build-your-own-na...

⬐ None
None
⬐ shawnps
The part about core rope memory was pretty interesting. Star charts and other bits of data were actually woven into a form of read-only memory via loom:

https://youtu.be/xY45YE7ggng?t=1155

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

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