Moon machines

To begin with I really liked the documentary, most of the time it provided a simple and kind of a tale like feel to the story, one of the first thing that got my attention was what they said about the adjustable speed of the clock in the lab, today that probably would be unorthodox, but in that day where people where not as connected with their devices it could really have had its purpose.

Clearly lots of admirable people where involved in the project, not only because of their smarts but because their out of protocol way of doing things, that could have gone bad easily and it kind of went wrong talking about all the delays that they had but in the end I think they took just enough precautions to compensate for the wacky things they were doing. Proof of that was using the last, basically not finished tech (silicon chips), that was their bold move, but they rejected most of the chips that were sent and took enough precautions to make it a viable solution and probably the best they had at the time.

And talking about the software development of that age, well what can I say, It was probably at its worst, there weren’t specifications and the amount of time to test any changes you did or any new line of code you added were too much, probably errors and bugs were the most common thing to see in those early stages prolonging development times, some of the problems were kind of compensated because of the talent that was involved in the project but the constraints were huge and the process was still in dippers, the techniques to measure the scale of a project and complexity weren’t there so those were commonly miscalculated, deadlines, budgets, man hours, it was a miracle that it was even finished.

I think the moon journeys were early in human history, they stretched the capabilities of technology of the time way beyond anyone could have imagined, probably one of the funniest, hardest, most stressful times for everyone involved. At the end it actually paid off and propelled lots of technological advancements forward into this age.

Moon Machines EP3: Navigation Computer. Science Channel, 2008, www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ1O0XR_cA0.