Moon Machines
This entry is about the documentary Moon Machines EP3: Navigation Computer.
It is really amazing to watch this documentary and not only see how much has humankind evolved building software but also the capabilities of the computers and hardware.
Navigation has been for years one of the biggest challenges for humans. Day by day, we trie to come up with different solutions to reduce human error in navigation by automizing most of the job. Some of the example that this may include are autonomous cars and better real-time routing.
Also, while I was watching the documentary and the part about the 1201, 1202 alarms starts, I couldn't help to think that Garmond (the guy that knew the alarms meanings) was one of the most cautious guy if not the only one enough to write the alarms. I could also linked that to nowadays when you get strange status codes and you don't know what they mean, because the programmer didn't have good practices and standards to write meaningful status codes. Of course back by 1969, there weren't standardized status codes.
What is also wonderful to see in the documentary was how the size of the gyroscope has evolved so much through the years. Not only the size, but also the availability. Nowadays, we have gyroscopes implemented almost anywhere, and they reached a high level of obtainability. It is amazing to see that one of the first places they started with professional use, was the NASA and they were used to send men to the moon.
Finally, one of the parts that impressed me was the description of the OS they were using which could handle different tasks with different priorities. This may have been one of the first implementations of something similar to a priority queue or a prioritized scheduler system.
It is really amazing to watch this documentary and not only see how much has humankind evolved building software but also the capabilities of the computers and hardware.
Navigation has been for years one of the biggest challenges for humans. Day by day, we trie to come up with different solutions to reduce human error in navigation by automizing most of the job. Some of the example that this may include are autonomous cars and better real-time routing.
Also, while I was watching the documentary and the part about the 1201, 1202 alarms starts, I couldn't help to think that Garmond (the guy that knew the alarms meanings) was one of the most cautious guy if not the only one enough to write the alarms. I could also linked that to nowadays when you get strange status codes and you don't know what they mean, because the programmer didn't have good practices and standards to write meaningful status codes. Of course back by 1969, there weren't standardized status codes.
What is also wonderful to see in the documentary was how the size of the gyroscope has evolved so much through the years. Not only the size, but also the availability. Nowadays, we have gyroscopes implemented almost anywhere, and they reached a high level of obtainability. It is amazing to see that one of the first places they started with professional use, was the NASA and they were used to send men to the moon.
Finally, one of the parts that impressed me was the description of the OS they were using which could handle different tasks with different priorities. This may have been one of the first implementations of something similar to a priority queue or a prioritized scheduler system.
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