[OT] We Choose The Moon

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

Ben,

Thanks for that email and those links.

I got curious about the fact that MAC was the first "high order computer
language", so I started searching for that and found this link:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/07/17/236650/apollo-11-the-computers-that-put-man-on-the-moon.htm

which has some nice photos of the mission and a picture of the on-board
computers and the IBM mainframes that supported them.

I am downloading a PDF of the AGC program "Luminary" and I can not help
but notice that the PDF of the program that used to fit in less than 64
K "bytes" of memory takes 80 MB as a PDF, but it is a scanned-in
hard-copy version of the program (complete with 3-holed paper punches).

The program used on the Lunar Lander is also there, but beware as it is
622 MB.

Later I found an abstract of a paper (but not the whole paper) that
said:

        Part one details the conception and development by Dr J.
        Halcombe Laning, Jr of “George”, the world's first algebraic
        compiler for use on Project Whirlwind—MIT's first experimental
        all-digital computer. This was indeed challenging since
        Whirlwind at that time had but 1024 sixteen-bit words. Dr Laning
        began work in the summer of 1952 and the first version of the
        George compiler was finished in March of 1953.
        
        In the early fifties many people were debating the feasibility
        of a system for translating algebraic formulae into computer
        programs which would allow the engineer to avoid the all too
        painstaking and error-prone task of writing programs using basic
        computer code. But Hal Laning was the first to do it.
        
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