Moon Machines

I found very interesting the documentary called "Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer" produced by Science Channel. I am surprised by the number of people who got involved in the project (More than 400,000). Also, I think that the fact that NASA did a contract with a university (MIT) was something extraordinary, even in our times, because it is not something usual to make such big contracts with universities.

I also found very interesting the gyroscope that was created at MIT, I think it was a brilliant idea that was made very precisely and in a mechanical way. Also, I think that, with the old technology, an instrument with the accurate required for the gyroscope must have been a very big challenge.

By the other side, I think the way they checked the quality of the integrated circuits was quite rigorous. They had to reject a whole lot if a chip weighed a few micrograms of difference to what it should. I am sure that this level of quality was necessary, but I also think that it must have been very hard to do. In spite of the above, I think it was very important that the workers had in mind that the lives of people were at stake and that the quality of the chips played a very important role in that.

Another thing that I found very interesting, was that the traditional computational timeshare had evolved into a computational timeshare prioritized based on the needs of NASA. It is clear to me that the role that software played in the project of taking man to the moon was quite important, so much so that many software techniques had to evolve in the moment.

I found it incredible that, with a lot of money available, the memory limit for NASA was around only 72 Kilobytes; I also found it incredible, that with so little memory they have managed to build a very complex system. However, what was most impressive for me was that they made a rope memory.

Finally, I think that the work of each engineering area that participated in the project was very important for the success of the mission. And I think software engineering got a lot of attention after the mission.