Submission + - Apollo 11 Had a Hidden Hero: Software (wsj.com)
Outatime writes: Monday's Wall Street Journal includes a special Apollo 11 feature; of particular interest to many Slashdot nerds is the piece on the pioneering computer hardware and software that took three astronauts, and landed two, on the moon.
From the article:
[On July 20, 1969,] the lives of two astronauts, the efforts of more than 300,000 technicians, the labor of eight years at a cost of $25 billion, and the pride of a nation depended on a few lines of pioneering computer code. Humans had never risked so much on zeros and ones. Yet they decided to trust the machine and the binary two-digit code, and Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin reaped the glory as the first people to walk on the moon.
From the article:
[On July 20, 1969,] the lives of two astronauts, the efforts of more than 300,000 technicians, the labor of eight years at a cost of $25 billion, and the pride of a nation depended on a few lines of pioneering computer code. Humans had never risked so much on zeros and ones. Yet they decided to trust the machine and the binary two-digit code, and Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin reaped the glory as the first people to walk on the moon.
