“We didn’t know what we couldn’t do. So we just went ahead and did it.” Those are the words David Platt heard repeated during a recent gathering of engineers who worked on the Apollo moon missions.
I love the history of the Apollo guidance system. Somewhere, tucked away in non-digital, faded paper in my file of "things to keep forever" is a photocopy of an article "The Greatest Software in History", and the article argued that
it's the Apollo computer system that merits the title, hands down, given what the system had to do and the ridiculously small amount of ROM the engineers had to work with.
