Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Vintage computing enthusiasts have recreated NASA’s legendary “Apollo Guidance Computer,” the 1960s-era assembly-language onboard guidance and navigation computer for the Apollo missions to the moon. Unfortunately, the software had been lost for the Apollo 10 mission (a manned “dress rehearsal” mission which flew to the moon eight weeks before Neil Armstrong’s famous moonwalk mission). But spaceflight…
Tag: apollo guidance computer
Why Can We Write Software To Get To the Moon, But Not To Count Votes
minstrelmike shares a report. From the article: The best way to get a feel for what NASA’s job was like is to read some of the code, now immortalized in a GitHub repository. Choose a file at random. GROUND_TRACKING_DETERMINATION_PROGRAM.agc, for instance, has 204 lines and more than 85 of them are comments. Each of the lines consists of only one operation,…
‘Mining Bitcoin On a 1983 Apple II: a Highly Impractical Guide’
option8 ((Slashdot reader #16,509) writes: TL;DR: Mining Bitcoin on a 1MHz 8-bit processor will cost you more than the world’s combined economies, and take roughly 256 trillion years. “But it could happen tomorrow. It’s a lottery, after all,” explains the blog post (describing this mad scientist as a hardware hacker and “self-taught maker”, determined to mine bitcoin “in what must be…
Bitcoin Mining On an Apollo Guidance Computer: 10.3 Seconds Per Hash
Slashdot reader volvox_voxel shares an excerpt from the latest blog post from software engineer Ken Shirriff, who is well known for his work on restoring some of the rarest computing hardware to its working condition: We’ve been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer1. Now that we have the world’s only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Trying to…