The-Vessel-Spiralling-Out-Of-Control

Back in Houston, an engineer realized that while the machine was temporarily overloaded, its clever programming allowed it to automatically shed less important tasks and focus on landing.- Real-time input -It also needed new ways for man to interact with machine that went beyond the punch-card programming of the time.But in the early era of computers, we thought of them in a fundamentally different way.The engineers came up with three key ways: the switches that you still find in modern cockpits, a hand-controller that was connected to the worlds first digital fly-by-wire system, and a "display and keyboard" unit, abbreviated DSKY (pronounced "dis-key").The astronauts would input two-digit codes for verbs and nouns, to carry out commands like firing thrusters, or locking on to a particular star if the ship, which relied on an inertial guidance system to keep its pitch, roll and yaw stable, had begun to drift off course. Despite an infamous false alarm during lunar descent that sent Commander Neil Armstrong's heart rate racing, it was a resounding success that laid the groundwork for everything from modern avionics to multitasking operating systems.
In the early 1960s, the two agencies bought almost all the microchips made in the US, roughly a million all told, added O'Brien, forcing the makers to improve their designs and build circuits that lasted longer than their early life cycles of just a few hours..O'Brien used the metaphor of a tourist who visits the US and is hungry but doesn't know much English, and might say "Eat pizza" to convey the basic meaning."The way that Gloves Binding Machine Factory computer handled the overload was a real breakthrough" said Paul Ceruzzi, a Smithsonian Institution scholar on aerospace electronics.NASA felt it required an onboard computer to handle all these functions in case the Soviets tried to jam radio communications.We've all been there: you're working on something important, your PC crashes, and you lose all your progress."With that terribly small capacity, they were able to do all the amazing things that we now think of as completely normal," he said.Such an event could well have been catastrophic, forcing the crew to abort their mission or even sending the vessel spiralling out of control to the surface.All of this required a software "architecture," much of which was designed by engineer Hal Laning.- Multitasking -Modern computers, such as the smartphone in your pocket, are generally capable of doing a myriad of tasks all at once: handling emails in one window, a GPS map in another, various social network apps, all the while ready for incoming calls and texts.That all changed with Apollo Guidance Computer, a briefcase-sized machine that needed to juggle an array of vital tasks, from navigating the ship to running its oxygen generator, heaters and carbon dioxide scrubbers."There wasn't a lot they were asked to do.