Moon Machines

 

It was a really interesting documentary that showed that in our field we have management problems since the beginning, and it is something that may not have changed much at all even 50 years from the Apollo 11 launch. Also, I had not realized how many people or how resource intensive the Apollo 11 project required. When it said that the project used 60% of the chips in in the USA it dawned on me how resource intensive the project must have been. Another dawning moment was realizing that the Apollo 11 was the first-time human lives where in the hands of software and how it becomes more commonplace.

The Apollo 11 mission on the software side looks like it suffered through a lot of issues with its design, its management and its documentation. It sounded crazy that no one knew what the alarms were, and that the only guy who documented something was mocked for doing so. Also, the crunch times of the project sound insane, referring as most of them divorcing because of how much time they spent in the office. Another detail that was mind blowing was when they explain how they use to code by hand and has seamstress making the code, I never imagined that coding was such a painstaking task, and having big compilation times to check if what you wrote was right. The documentary was inspiring because as much problems as they describe you know that at the end of the day they managed to send someone to the moon and back with less memory and processing power than the machine I am using to write this blog post.

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