Under hard time pressure, the ground had to quickly figure out what was wrong and devise a workaround. What they came up with was the most brilliant computer hack of the entire Apollo program, and possibly in the entire history of electronic computing.
To explain exactly what the hack was, how it functioned, and the issues facing the developers during its creation, we need to dig deep into how the Apollo Guidance Computer worked. Hold onto your hats, Ars readers—we’re going in.
Amazing story.
I object to calling those virtual machines. Its more correct to say it had an operating system. No hardware was being emulated.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
He took some liberties, but it’s still a fun read. They broke a lot of ground in a lot of diverse areas.
I actually thought this article was going to be about a different apollo instance when the programs were aborting during the landing sequence and it’s only because they auto-restarted that the mission didn’t end badly. While I’m impressed that it all worked out, another part of me is shocked that things were so fragile in the first place.
NASA’s work became the precursor to microcontrollers. These are a lot of fun to worth with and would have saved NASA a lot of trouble if only they existed, haha 🙂
Absolutely amazing work that the Apollo team did, no question. Having an operating system that could run simultaneous programs was an absolute luxury at the time. They did amazing things. But, I cringe when ever a writer goes back and unnecessarily throws in buzzzwords to embellish the feats. Its very History Channel. The pyramids are amazing enough, without having to claim that aliens were involved, or time travelers or whatever. Just wait, thats what the early space exploration will turn into, if it hasn’t already.
In retrospect, I’m surprised the author used an older buzzword. He could have claimed they were containers, or docker or kubernetes clusters or thrown in a pun about “cloud” computing.
The JVM (Java Virtual Machine) isn’t emulating real hardware. The article actually makes the comparison to Java bytecode. The term virtual machine is valid