Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings earlier this year, this talk will describe the revolutionary computer, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).The AGC made autonomous travel to the Moon and back not only possible but added profoundly to crew safety, flight profile accuracy and even optimized propellant use to such an extent that final mission plans traded fuel for added weight in equipment and lunar samples.
This talk will give an overview of the AGC hardware architecture and the guidance software it executed, as well as the pioneering efforts in developing both. HPC/CSE software developers will discover many familiar themes such as flops/watt power constraints, domain specific languages and performance portability challenges. The talk will conclude with several user stories about the actual operation of the AGC in various Apollo missions.