Assembly Code That Took America to the Moon Now Published On GitHub (qz.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it's like a 1960s time capsule," reports Quartz. Two lines of code include the comment "# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE," and there's also a quote from Shakespeare's play Henry VI. In addition, the keyboard and display system program is named PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHT, and "There's also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to 'crank the silly thing around.'"

A former NASA intern uploaded the thousands of lines of assembly code to GitHub, working from a 2003 transcription made from scans inherited by MIT from a Colorado airplane pilot, and developers are already using GitHub to submit funny issue tickets for the 40-year-old code -- for example, "Extension pack for picking up Matt Damon". Another issue complains that "A customer has had a fairly serious problem with stirring the cryogenic tanks with a circuit fault present." Because this issue succinctly describes the Apollo 13 mission in 1970, the issue has been marked "closed".

Comments

Re:good code too

[Lumpy]

And remember they did ALL OF THIS with integer only math and NO freaking math libraries.

Want to drive a fre grad programmer nuts? have him convert celcius to Farenheit and Kelvin with 4 decimal places of accuracy using only integer math on an 8 bit micro, no you can not use ANY libraries at all, and you need to do it in less than 6 lines of code.

Most shit themselves.