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Comment by robotresearcher | Hacker News Reader

> Also note the size of that printout of her program.

That print out is not the source code. I'm pretty sure it's a listing of test results. The Apollo computers couldn't store that much in either (the equivalent of) RAM or ROM.

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Hamilton herself says otherwise:

> "In this picture, I am standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code," Hamilton says in an email. "To clarify, there are no other kinds of printouts, like debugging printouts, or logs, or what have you, in the picture." It's just her and her code.

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481/margaret-hamilton-apoll...

I knew I read it was the code somewhere but lacked a link past Wikipedia. Thanks for that one! Original claim stays and remains at elite level it was. :)

Also before the picture lies this statement - Here's an amazing picture of her next to the code she and her colleagues wrote for the Apollo 11 guidance computer that made the moon landing possible:

If she says so of course I'll concede the point. I don't really understand how it can be true, since the recorded specs of the AGC were 4K RAM and 64K ROM. That's only a few pages of text even in assembly code.

There is a scan of the program here [0], which is 1,746 pages. That seems much less than the number of pages in the photo (by maybe a factor of 10 or so?).

If I had to guess, maybe they printed out each revision of the program? Apparently there were seven different versions [1], so if the stack contains all of them, that would account for the difference pretty well.

[0] http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a... [1] http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/links.html#Software_manuals_an...

Ok I'll buy that. The claim is "listings of the code" so several iterations of the code is consistent with that, if superficially misleading.

As will I. Over 1,000+ pages of source is believable and still one hell of an accomplishment at the quality level. I still consider the possibility that the stack included specs of successful or error states given the importance of those for a working program. I know she liked including tons of error handling in everything. Most might have done that with tests but she did it in primary stuff. So, there's room for stuff in there that's not pure source as modern developers would consider.

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