"Wanna Build a ...? NASA’s About to Give Away a Mountain of Its Code"
 

Cool: http://www.wired.com/2014/04/nasa-gu...mbid=social_fbYay NASA! :D

this has been up for a few years already

http://code.nasa.gov/project/

Cool.
It makes sense NASA (like opining sources) is smart and it's about to expand (at lest the free code.) :)

Great Ruby!

I should really make time! ;)

There basically wasn't any software on those systems that (supposedly ...) went to the moon. Ostensibly, they did it with slide rules.

If you are really interested in Apollo Guidance Computers and their software check out:
http://agcreplica.outel.org/

the LEM's landing computer had " rope" program storage

and almost all of the old Apollo era NASA code is for a CRAY mainframe
and most of the shuttle code is also for a then OLD and almost ancient cray mainframe that the cape was still using .

one that kept CRASHING during a shuttle launch

now there is a ton of new and newish code .
i use a few NASA/JPL and JPL/USGS programs

there are also many many tons of ancient f77 code

and a lot of code wrote for RH3 to rh9 ( pre RHEL days )

Oh yes, there was. Aldrin even carried the complete hex dump for the program on rice paper (for the weight) in case he had to re-enter the code into that computer. If you google you'll find accurate descriptions for those computers, including details like memory capacity and word size.

jlinkels

Ahh, yes. The rice paper story. There would have been no time to re-enter that program with switches during the very critical time any such thing would have been needed.

I think that the movie, Capricorn One, says all that there needs to be said about the Apollo project, and about how easily it could be accepted by a population that had never seen special effects before. A much-beloved and recently-assassinated President had made a promise that technologically couldn't (and, still can't) be kept, but NASA was determined to make the wish come true anyway. (And, yeah, I was there then. I watched it too.) It was a time when people wanted to believe that technology, and the US Government, could do anything, and that if you saw it on television it must be true. But even today sattelites get burned to a crisp by solar radiation and by the concentrated power of the belts which deflect that fury away from us. (All of the "space walks" that we do are inside some of those belts, as are the majority of satellites, which are "not geosynchronous" for a good reason.) Two men in a capsule with the shielding of a telephone booth, or standing on the surface of an entirely unshielded planetoid, would have been similarly fried. But we just didn't know to think about such things, then. And who knows, maybe it was a good thing to seem to make JFK's wish come true.

The shuttle's used an IBM AP101 avionics computer which are based upon the 360s. I'm not sure what NASA used to compile the code.

lol

Well it was a nice era anyway. The Cold War wasn't nice, but you knew who was good and who was bad. No terrorism yet, and the muslims stayed home.

What keeps on amazing me is the unbelievable amount of research, development and production has been achieved in those years between 1961 and 1969. All those projects which were outsourced by NASA, all the specifications, procurement, testing, acceptance, trainings, whatnot and that in only 8 years time. And this was not simple product development, this was highly unknown territory. In 1961 or 1962 they only decided on the rendez-vouz model and knew they would need a capsule, an LM and a 3-men crew. So from that point on development started. In that time it took 7 years to develop a new car, and that was by a single company. Incredible to manage a project like this and have everyting fit in time and space. (Pun intended)

And I often quote JFK if someone complains something is too difficult: "We are not doing this because it is easy, we are doing this because it is hard. Because we want to demonstrate we can do better than others"

jlinkels

It was, indeed, an ... improbably ... amazing bit of progress, which was never matched by any other engineering team before or since.

Think about it: nothing ever went wrong for the Apollo space program, except for one mission that somehow also had a storybook ending. JFK's promise was fulfilled to the national glory-ment of all. Right on time. All on television. It was too good to be true . . .

But, sometimes a good cover-story is what the public wants, and so it is what you should be careful to give them. No one wants to think about "a right-hand man coup d'etat" occurring in America. No one wants to consider that what a young, energetic President promised the world could not actually be achieved, let alone "by 1969." No one wanted to consider that three (not just two) buildings in downtown New York were successfully demolitioned. No, these are not palatable stories to millions of people. Therefore, these are not the stories that you tell them. And, there is something to be said for that approach.

Yes, something did go wrong... What About Apollo 1?

the 1 fire was do to the 100% O2 environment being as sea-level pressure and NOT at 3 PSI