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1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2019 23:18:42 EDT Nate Cull

   Hamilton
   My name is Margaret Hamilton
   And there's a million things I haven't done
   But just you wait, just you wait

   https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/underappreciated-power-apollo-computer/594121/

   1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2019 23:20:03 EDT Nate Cull

      in reply to

      Not often talked about: the missile origins of Apollo.

      << Conceptually, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which designed the system, built it atop the work they’d done for the Polaris guided-missile system, made to launch nuclear weapons from American submarines. The Apollo computer's hardware, as Mindell has noted, was fairly well understood “in the world of military avionics.” >>

      1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2019 23:20:51 EDT Nate Cull

         in reply to

         VMs were everywhere in the 1960s-1970s... even in Tiny BASIC, as I recall.

         << To maximize the built-in architecture, Hamilton and her colleagues came up with what they named “The Interpreter”—we’d now call it a virtualization scheme. It allowed them to run five to seven virtual machines simultaneously in two kilobytes of memory. >>

         1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 20-Jul-2019 23:21:58 EDT Nate Cull

            in reply to

            The verb/noun interface is still a pretty cool idea, I think. Essentially virtualised global variables / procedures:

            << Verbs were things the computer could do (“78 UPDATE PRELAUNCH AZIMUTH”). Nouns were numerical quantities or measurements (“33 TIME OF IGNITION”). It was a long way from point-and-click simplicity. >>