Abstract

On July 24th 1969 Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, achieving one of humanity’s greatest triumphs but the Saturn V would have been helpless if not for its brain: the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). How did the engineers design hardware and software reliable enough to land a man on the moon? How did the AGC achieve concurrency and handle I/O on a single processor? How did they overcome continuous design changes throughout the project and a perpetual lack of memory?

In this talk we will answer these questions and take a look at the structure and architecture of the AGC . We will also see how a 1202 computer alarm threatened to cause the mission to abort minutes before the landing and show in actual fact that the AGC performed flawlessly.