Your iPhone couldn't have gotten Neil Armstrong to the moon, don't kid yourself.
By now, you've probably heard — and maybe even repeated yourself — that the phone in your pocket or even a basic pocket calculator is more powerful than the computer than landed astronauts on the moon during NASA's Apollo program.32,768 bits of Random Access Memory and only 72KB of Read-Only Memory.
This struggle to overcome the greatest engineering challenge humanity ever put its mind to, both from a hardware and a software perspective, is one of the most incredible feats of ingenuity ever accomplished and it's about time everybody recognized that fact.Without question, if you asked Margaret Hamilton and the other software engineers responsible for getting Apollo astronauts to the moon and back, they would have loved to have more computer resources to get the job done.
Did it have iPhone levels of elegance in its human-computer interface? Hardly. Did it work? Brilliantly.Let me tell you something about How did NASA engineers prevent this problem? By turning all of the software needed to run the Apollo Guidance Computer into actual physical hardware thatSo long as the Apollo Guidance Computer was powered, the computer would run any of the software in its fixed, read-only memory, thanks to this novel innovation.
Hamilton's solution to this problem was a revolutionary one: treat software development with the same rigor as you would a problem of hardware engineering, and even coined the term"software engineering" to hammer home the point that their work needed to be just as precise as the work that went into the rockets that flew astronauts into space. probably
Crucially, this saved the Apollo 11 lunar module landing as it neared the lunar surface. As the module got closer to the surface, its sensors were picking up far more data than the guidance computer could process. As it turned out, the Apollo 11 crew's checklist for the landing had them set the
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