http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Comanche055/PINBALL_G...
>Filename: PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.agc
Can someone explain what this is? I doubt they had an actual game of pinball in their guidance computer.
>Filename: PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.agc
Can someone explain what this is? I doubt they had an actual game of pinball in their guidance computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#Softw...
A set of interrupt-driven user interface routines called Pinball provided keyboard and
display services for the jobs and tasks running on the AGC. A rich set of user-accessible
routines were provided to let the operator (astronaut) display the contents of various
memory locations in octal or decimal in groups of 1, 2, or 3 registers at a time.
Monitor routines were provided so the operator could initiate a task to
periodically redisplay the contents of certain memory locations. Jobs could be
initiated. The Pinball routines performed the (very rough) equivalent of the
UNIX shell.This is well commented code, for assembly.
We should encourage software to be written as if it will one day fly in space.
# THE KEYBOARD AND DISPLAY SYSTEM PROGRAM OPERATES UNDER EXECUTIVE
# CONTROL AND PROCESSES INFORMATION EXCHANGED BETWEEN THE AGC AND THE
# COMPUTER OPERATOR. THE INPUTS TO THE PROGRAM ARE FROM THE KEYBOARD,
# FROM INTERNAL PROGRAM, AND FROM THE UPLINK.
I think it's just someone with a sense of humor.
Yeah I think that's the only explanation for it literally saying "GAME".
"Apparently, nobody had yet arrived at any kind of software requirements for the AGC's user interface when the desire arose within the Instrumentation Laboratory to set up a demo guidance-computer unit with which to impress visitors to the lab. Of course, this demo would have to do something, if it was going to be at all impressive, and to do something it would need some software. In short order, some of the coders threw together a demo program, inventing and using the verb/noun user-interface concept, but without any idea that the verb/noun concept would somehow survive into the flight software. As time passed, and more and more people became familiar with the demo, nobody got around to inventing an improvement for the user interface, so the coders simply built it into the flight software without any specific requirements to do so."[1]