Man, I would have given up some serious allowance money for this back when the Apollo program was active.
Reading through the descriptions of some of the flight and launch control systems gives me a high level of respect for the software folk responsible. Sure, the systems were simple compared to today, but there was no room for any of the sloppiness we see passed off as "software engineering" in the interim years. "Mmm, I'm not entirely sure about that launch abort method, but we'll check it in, see if test finds anything."
I went to a talk by one of the people responsible for the Apollo guidance software (Dr. Battin from what was in the 1960s the MIT Instrumentation Lab) a few years ago. One of his stories was about how some astronauts visited Raytheon where the code was being effectively "woven" into the core memory. As he explained it, one of the purposes of the visit was to impress upon those (women) who were making the core memories that it was really important not to make a mistake because otherwise these nice young boys would die.
Reading through the descriptions of some of the flight and launch control systems gives me a high level of respect for the software folk responsible. Sure, the systems were simple compared to today, but there was no room for any of the sloppiness we see passed off as "software engineering" in the interim years. "Mmm, I'm not entirely sure about that launch abort method, but we'll check it in, see if test finds anything."