Computer control of a machine for exploring Mars (1964) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Computer control of a machine for exploring Mars (1964) [pdf]

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68 pointsabrax314124 comments

Is there a program that can take a LaTeX file and create a PDF that looks like a scanned type-written paper from 1964 ;)

The Automated Biological Laboratory https://archive.org/stream/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19660027176/#pa...

In OPs link there is a committee that says "No pics from mars, it's too hard to do", and then there is John talking about it like it's obvious pictures needs to be taken..

Viking 1 landed on Mars only 12 years later. Interesting that a paper about exploring the possibility of a computerized machine on Mars is written a scant 12 years before an actual landing of a fairly complex lander. Life between, say, 1960 and 1980 must have felt at a breakneck pace.

Viking 1 lander's abilities:

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/viking1landata.html

Others might also find this History of Lisp at JPL (used on both spacecraft and rovers) interesting:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

Father of Lisp was also Grandfather of the Mars Rovers!

He probably forethought of controlling rovers while designing Lisp. Genius man.

And the name of the proposed rover was "Beagle"!

Unfortunate name for a Mars rover, in the passage of time at least

Made me wonder if Beagle 2 was in fact inspired by that robotic thing from 1964...

I saw a TV programme about this last week, it was named after Charles Darwin’s ship - H.M.S. Beagle.

A bit of interesting reading here http://www.beagle2.com/author/beagle2/

Yes, I know, but I mean maybe there was a hidden meaning to it.

I'm surprised he recommended a time interrupt of around 1000 Hz, for a machine with microsecond memory cycle times.

It's got some Carl Sagan in it. Very good find.

Great vision from a great man.

Hey, HN Admins, is it really necessary to micro-manage the titles?! I had “by John McCarthy” (which is highly relevant, and in the next line in the doc)! It’s just a bit prissy to have to have the titles your favorite way all the time. Please stop it, and if you need to micromanage peoples posts, you should be working for Wikipedia. Yeah, yeah, I know ... OFF TOPIC!

Oh, I wouldn't have opened the link if it wasn't for the John McCarthy mention.

Indeed; I read this specifically because I was curious specifically what MacCarthy's requirements or specifications would have been for such a thing, back in 1964. I.e. the young MacCarthy take on the problem and how it reveals his thinking about such a thing.

What it reveals is that he had a very firm grasp on advanced computer and operating system architecture. He describes the requirements for an interrupt-driven concurrent system which has two levels of protection: a user and executive mode. Moreover, he recommends a small, well-debugged kernel be used, architected in such a way that errors in other pieces such as peripheral drivers, are recoverable. It's almost as if he's hinting at a micro-kernel architecture.

IIRC, it's automatic.

How do they do it? Prune "By X" every time? Or is there a more sophisticated system?

This seems to indicate some sort of cron just fetches the <title> tag a little while after something's posted and updates accordingly. Matches with my experience - I've seen perfectly good titles reverted to nonsensical garbage no admin would've manually reverted to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572910

But the title of this page was noise. The title was embedded in the pdf.

I think it’s manually done. They also moved the date to the end.

I know it feels like prissy micromanaging when your title is changed, but what you're really asking here is for us not to do our job. Having titles be neutral and (to use pg's original word) bookish is one of HN's key features and a far bigger deal than it might seem. If we didn't maintain that, HN would go to seed.

There are important principles behind everything we do with titles. In this case the principle is that HN works better when the focus is on content over personalities, so we edit out most author names and/or celebrity names in titles. This has been consistent for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7518157

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7668408

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9919304

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12573986

Yes, fine, but most of the point of this particular post was that it was John McCarthy, who is the father of Lisp. Otherwise, as someone said, it's just old flaming about mars landers. Moreover, if you take all personality out of science, you're doing science a disservice.

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