alt Hacker NewsOriginal Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for command and lunar modules
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Happy 10-year anniversary to this repo being shared on HN.
Most significant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048945, 652 points, 145 comments on July 7, 2016
All previous submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/chrislgarr...
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Comanch...
I feel like "BEWARE"... is, given the context, what we would now likely call "load-bearing"
COMPTGO EXTEND # USED TO COMPUTE TTOGO
QXCH PHSPRDT6 # ** GROUP 6 TEMPORARY USED .. BEWARE **
For an terrific AGC deep dive, I can’t recommend Marc’s restoration videos enough. The work they did was incredible:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x...
More here (linked in the repo):
Original scans (featuring Margaret Hamilton!)
The Virtual AGC Project Spaceborne Computer Systems
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/
The purpose of this project is to provide the original flight software and emulations of the onboard guidance computers flown in historical spacecraft, so that the flight software can be run on computers commonly available to the public today. The particular emphasis is on the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) flown in lunar missions in the 1960's and 1970's.
Wikipedia on the hardware:
Clicking around the code, it mentions a page with images... even more clicking around got me to this page/image: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Block1.html#DSKY / https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Block1ControlPanelDSKY.jpg
Damn, a control panel to input values, probably straight to the CPU. I guess the astronauts didn't have to learn assembly, but imagine a programmer having to recite all the raw code (I guess the commands (verbs) are numeric as well) to debug something, all the way at the moon.
Previously posted by me here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182669 - but didn't get any interest, not complaiing, good that it got noticed this time.
A truly great historical artifact of human space adventure
As other commenters have pointed out, some of the comments in there are pretty scary. I guess the astronauts didn't have to read the code:
`TC WHIMPER -1 # YES. DONT DO POODOO. DO BAILOUT.`
For a superb video explaining what the AGC did and what WENT WRONG during the moon landing including the error codes:l, see: https://youtu.be/B1J2RMorJXM?si=Ad1UYojAtee2ktr3
Really cool to see this digitized and archived, it's such an important piece of history and really one of the earliest digital ic bases computers.
To see the code in action (and learn many good things about Apollo computer) please watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM&pp=ygUPYXBvbGxvI...
Great to see the AGC assembly code and knowing that Apollo 11 is coded purely in assembly. Not sure if it has any compiler. Also found https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc while searching for compiler.
Well, I have no idea how complete this is, but perhaps a neat Christmas-time-project for anyone with seemingly unlimited tokens to take this and let it build up a simulator, using the real code to drive simulated machinery.
the code that landed humans on the moon has 72k stars on github and your startup's monorepo still can't pass CI on the first try
The contribution of the 1969 assembly language is appreciated.
Strange that no one took the effort to fix yaYUL to read the YUL format, but instead of adapting the transcription of the source to match the 'quirks' of yaYUL.
I think I read somewhere around here the code could be run today on something as low powered as the chip that runs the USB charger for an iphone
So yeah I'd like to see that lol
I swear, every few years something like this or exactly this seems to come up on HN
Orion on Artemis has a bunch of really cool stuff like redundant computers but it's certainly jarring to go from Verbs and Nouns of Apollo to seeing them tapping on screens with a GUI
looks like its not hard to read assembly code
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Ok, someone evaluate it with Fable and vibecode it better. Remember "make no mistake".
This is such an interesting peek into the engineering of these sort of systems with very constrained resources at the time. Like any random file you open contains little pragmatic design decisions like this
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Comanch...
# THE POSITION OF THE MOON IS STORED IN THE COMPUTER IN THE FORM OF # A NINTH DEGREE POLYNOMIAL APPROXIMATION WHICH IS VALID OVER A 15 # DAY INTERVAL BEGINNING SHORTLY BEFORE LAUNCH. THEREFORE THE TIME # INPUT BY THE USER SHOULD FALL WITHIN THIS 15 DAY INTERVAL.
Better be back home in 15 days! ;)