Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

Second conference

September 14, 2001

Alex Kosmala's introduction

ALEX KOSMALA: I joined the Lab in early 1963, for the second time following a year's stint as a guest engineer on the Polaris program three years previously. Dan [Lickly] was the one who persuaded me to return from England shortly after the start of the Apollo program. I came as a physics graduate. I knew nothing about computers, analog or digital. I knew nothing about programming.

DAN LICKLY: I knew that! (Laughter)

ALEX KOSMALA: One of my observations, actually, has to do with that. We grew the knowledge to tackle a given problem to the extent that we needed to understand it, to control it, and to write programs that control it. To me, it was always amazing that so few people, relatively inexperienced in the subject with which we were dealing -- they were just smart people -- managed to acquire enough information from the vast array of resources around us in the lab, to not be blocked by a wall of ignorance. There was no "I can't move because I don't know." You went and found out. You talked to people. And there weren't very many people that you needed to do that with.

To me, one of the strengths of that program was the few people that were involved. We often came to the conclusion -- Dan and I talked about this in the early days -- that the optimum size of a software group producing complicated software like this was about five or six.

During some of the stressful periods where we were really churning this stuff out, there were little knots of five or six people that really put the foundations to this.

One of my roles, when I began to feel my way around, that I can remember, and my memory really is starting to come apart at the edges, was to integrate some of these areas. There was a launch area. There was a re-entry area. There was a powered flight area. Groups of people were separately investigating the technical problems in these various areas.

I had to amalgamate these areas in order to achieve our first guided flight, which we knew as Apollo 202. My job was to manufacture the "glue" [a term we used to describe the additional code required to integrate these separate sections into a flight program] and just make stuff up in order to create a working program that could then be manufactured into an AGC "rope."

My role was to knit these pieces together into a functioning whole, and to then test the hell out of it. My memory has dimmed the pain but it was a heck of a lot of hard work, and long hours. In the end, it all did work. If I remember rightly that first flight landed remarkably close to its objective in the Pacific.

DAN LICKLY: Being late, late for lunch because I wouldn't let you go. You were dying of hunger. You remember a few of those, right?

ALEX KOSMALA: I can ramble on. But I think, to me, the amazing thing about this, looking back, was the quality of the people, the "fewness" of the people, the immense support that you got from all the resources that were right around you. The openness, I guess, is what you were referring to before. We, ourselves, at least that's what I felt, were the only blocks because of ignorance. But we overcame that as we went along and we made it work. I'd like to hear what some of the other people have to say.

Jim Miller's introduction

site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown