Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

Second conference

September 14, 2001

Historical Lessons

FRED MARTIN: I might tell you, just as a closing comment from me, is that Dick Battin has asked me, last year, to be a guest lecturer at one of his sessions. He runs a freshman seminar on Apollo. And he has these kids come in. And last year, he had Harrison Schmitt, the astronaut. He had a number of other people and I was there. He was trying to get Don Eyles to come in.  It's really sort of remarkable. I only did it once. What you do is you're talking to these kids who are about 18 years old. And they really know almost nothing about Apollo, zero. Whatever they know, they know from television or a cartoon. Or maybe they read something. They know nothing.

But it is interesting. The level of interest that they have in the program. And usually, a certain percentage of them, like four out of eight or five out of ten, they all want to be astronauts. That's one of the things that drives them. You wonder why this person, as a freshman, takes this freshman seminar with Dick Battin on Apollo from 30 years ago. But it is interesting. Of course, Dick loves it. And I did bring in some artifacts. This is a program listing. This is a this, this is a that. Most of it is just getting up to a blackboard and drawing a few stick figures and telling them a little bit about how we got to the moon and something about the computer. Each person has something else to say, of course. I'm sure that Harrison Schmidt gave them the whole astronaut viewpoint.

It is remarkable for these kids to have this connection through Dick Battin to this world because it's something that very few people, very few high school students or very few freshman in college could have an opening to, and to have these individuals appear in front of them. Dick just loves it

ALEX KOSMALA: So something I felt-- I know, coming from Europe, I've got friends and relatives there. The incredible intensity of that interest in Apollo, what happened-- I often feel, since I was in it, I haven't done my bit in satisfying some of the yearning for information and contact with this glamorous world. That's just sort of a popular reaction. It has nothing to do with military academia or business. The man on the street saw the American Apollo program as just an incredible achievement.

FRED MARTIN: If it ever really happened.

ALEX KOSMALA: Indeed, people who weren't even alive then have great interest in Apollo.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: One of the functions of our website will be to provide a window into the history of this program for students, and general audience might be interested in that. It will not only post basic documents, but also include human subjective perspectives on these events.

JIM MILLER: Your job is going to be a severe one in terms of getting young people now interested in things that, by comparison with today's technology, are so ancient and so primitive. Why would anybody want to look back at a machine that had a 3 bit OP code and 12 bit address.

I just bought the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000. It says, you need to have 635 megabytes of disk space available. Good heavens.

DAN LICKLY: Wait 'til you see the operating system that comes out this fall.

JIM MILLER: If this is what the kids are dealing with, why would they care about a 36K word machine and the problems that went with it that are just so completely removed from today's problems? It can be knitted into today. But that's a challenge.

MARGARET HAMILTON: I would like to make a comment along with your comment. I think that, in looking around at software problems today, that many of the same problems tare here that were here yesterday. And I think many of the things that we learned and that evolved, lessons learned, could still be learned today and benefit people in major ways. The hardware is different, perhaps, in this regard. But I think software, in fact, is worse in many ways now. It's generally done in a more primitive way now, in many respects than it was back then, certainly when compared to the way it was done on Apollo.

ALEX KOSMALA: Because the resources are limitless, people just don't try.

MARGARET HAMILTON: So I think we could go back and learn a lot and a lot from what has evolved from that. If we can't, then some of us are in trouble.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: So, look at history not as just a progression of machines getting bigger and better but also as an evolution of human skill.

MARGARET HAMILTON: How you think, model and design. Exactly.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: And some of those skills, in the '60s, might have been something very valuable that is not really in use now.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Sometimes we go back to the very foundations, the very core, and learn from what we might have thrown away.

FRED MARTIN: The other thing is that people are, even though they can hold a hand-held GPS in their hand, they're still interested in how people did things with a sextant and a watch. Or not even a watch.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Or a DSKY, which I sometimes call it by mistake.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: Maybe we should have a simulator of the DSKY on the website where you can actually press keys and get results.

MARGARET HAMILTON: Yes. That would be great.

DAN LICKLY: Then you can call up all the programs and get the simulator going again.

FRED MARTIN: You can have your verbs and nouns.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: It's been a very, very interesting conversation. Thank you very much.

site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown