8 comments

  • starkparker 1 hour ago
    Happy 10-year anniversary to this repo being shared on HN.

    Most significant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12048945, 652 points, 145 comments on July 7, 2016

    All previous submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/chrislgarr...

  • prabhanjana_c 1 hour ago
    Great to see the AGC assembly code and knowing that Apollo 11 is coded purely in assembly. Not sure if it has any compiler. Also found https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc while searching for compiler.
    • palmotea 7 minutes ago
      > knowing that Apollo 11 is coded purely in assembly

      Of course. According to Wikipedia, it was introduced in 1966, so it's development must have been started earlier. Also according to Wikipedia higher-level languages like Fortran and Cobol were introduced in 1957/58. They were a cutting-edge technology of the era.

      So programmers of the day would have been comfortable with assembly, and the inefficiency and novelty of higher-level languages would have probably been a bad fit for the application.

      > Not sure if it has any compiler.

      What you're looking for is an assembler.

    • pistate 46 minutes ago
      Part of the AGC ROMs implemented a virtual machine for things like matrix multiplication. So, a higher level of abstraction was available but it was still very much coded in its own assembly language.
  • corvad 1 hour ago
    Really cool to see this digitized and archived, it's such an important piece of history and really one of the earliest digital ic bases computers.
  • miohtama 36 minutes ago
    In 1969, they had not invented lowercase yet.
  • guesswho_ 48 minutes ago
    [dead]