Apollo Guidance Computer History ProjectSecond conferenceSeptember 14, 2001
Alex Kosmala's introductionALEX 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. 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. site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown |
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