Protip:
When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,
"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes
I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."
meanwhile the Gemini Guidance Computer team laugh
"you MIT people had 4K of RAM, we had 39 whole bits AND WE WERE GRATEFUL"
@natecull 4096 words of 39 bits apiece, it looks like?
ah, actually they did have 4096... 36-bit words of writeable core RAM. Weird. Was the Gemini computer *bigger* than the Apollo one ????
The Apollo LVDC is the third computer on the ship that never gets any love cos it just ran the engines and wasn't sexy
<< and the MIT Instrumentation Labs' antibodies flooded in to destroy the invader with critiques and reports negative of the IBM report. >>
lol programmers then just like today
Ah! The LVDC had no ROM at all! Good lord. The entire program sat in RAM. Aaaaaaaaaaaa
@jk I think if the LVDC failed you had bigger problems since it literally only ran the launch stage and that either got jettisoned or exploded in the first few minutes
but they could patch it right up til launch time, yes
<< A so-called "bugger word" has been stuck at the end of each bank—no comments on this terminology, please, since I didn't invent it; when I asked Don Eyles some question that involved them, he somewhat-laconically stated "we called them check sums">>
Huh, and if you have ROM and RAM I guess it literally is a Harvard Architecture
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/BlockIII.html
I never thought of that before!
@natecull Well, 39 * 4096, if I'm reading that correctly. :P