The most interesting thing from that article is in the last bit, it took 400,000 people to put 2 people on the moon, I realized there was quite a team but that large ?? It baffles me.
Is there a breakdown of that number somewhere ?
Is there a breakdown of that number somewhere ?
It was also the first trip so R&D took a huge amount of effort.
Finally, everything had to be constantly reviewed so we did not accidently kill 3 people while the world was watching.
http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...
Each ROM word is a wire. If the wire goes through the first magnetic core, its first bit is a one; if it skips the core, its first bit is zero, and so on. Each of the 36,000 words of ROM needed to be threaded through these cores by hand. Amazing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_memory
(I imagine it was chosen because it's much more resilient to cosmic rays flipping a bit. But it's pretty much impossible to alter the program without creating the whole thing from scratch. The ultimate spaghetti code!)
It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into this man who is a household name, yet we actually know very little about him.