Software Development Lessons from the Apollo Program
summary
The Apollo Guidance Computer is a real programmable general‑purpose computer that runs a realtime OS and an interpreter, weighs 70 pounds and uses 50W, and never fails across thousands of flight hours. Development uses unit testing for mathy functions and heavy integration testing to catch miscommunication. Early team of ~20 grows to ~400 under hard deadlines. A landing‑threatening program alarm caused by 93% CPU peaks plus ~10% unexpected radar load is avoided by priority scheduling and an error‑code cheat sheet, and an emulator reproduces the whole system.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:12The Apollo Program
- 6:49Landing on the Moon
- 11:05Testing
- 13:24Integration Testing
- 15:16Software Development
- 19:31Working with Users
- 23:03The Interface
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