Fly me to the moon
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 by marcusGoogle released the source code of the Apollo 11 mission - together with an emulator.
On the first sight this may seem as yet another nerdish project, but it’s much more than that.
If you belong to the rare specie of Assembler programmers, you will have the unique chance to follow the thoughts of the people who coded a program that controlled a computer which flew a space-ship from Earth to the moon and back. Moreover, you have the possibility to see how the Lunar Module was programmed.
But for the rest of us, although we do not understand anything of that code, it’s an important artifact of history of mankind. Frankly, how many of those artifacts are we able to read? Hieroglyphs? Are they an important artifact of human history? Definitely.
Finally, there is an emulator to run the programmes on any computer. Somebody even made it possible to run that software on a handheld! 40 years ago, people racked their brains how to have an efficient computer that does not consume too much space and energy and today we could do the same with a mobile. I love IT.
Here’s the video…






