How did Apollo get to the moon with ~4KB of RAM

How I got here

Started with

How much memory did the Apollo guidance computer have?

Ended at

Apollo 11

The Trail

1. “apollo guidance computer specs” (google.com)
2. Apollo Guidance Computer (en.wikipedia.org)
3. Core rope memory (en.wikipedia.org)

   they literally WOVE the software. wire through the core = 1, around it = 0

4. Margaret Hamilton (software engineer) (en.wikipedia.org)
5. GitHub - chrislgarry/Apollo-11: Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code for the command and lunar modules. (github.com)

   the comments in the source are a treasure. 'TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE'

6. Apollo 11 (en.wikipedia.org)

What I came away with

About 2K words of erasable memory and 36K words of read-only rope memory, woven by hand. The 1202 alarms during the landing were the computer shedding low-priority jobs and restarting, which is exactly why it didn't fall over.

Keep going

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