James Thomson:
The video of my talk “An Illustrated History of Easter Eggs” is up.
This was a lot of fun to put together!
Lots of fun stuff here, from Atari, to the Finder, and later PCalc.
Update (2019-08-13): David Pogue (via The Talk Show):
In the Google Maps division, the best-known Easter egg appeared on March 10, 2018. It was International Mario Day (Mar10, get it?), celebrating the goofy Italian plumber from Nintendo’s video games.
[…]
The link then opens a photograph of beef brisket and a tribute to Memphis Minnie’s, a San Francisco barbecue restaurant. Mr. Mullenweg noted that because he makes this Terms of Service document available to anyone, “this Easter egg has actually been copied into many other companies’ terms of service, without them reading or noticing it.”
Amazon Atari Conference Easter Eggs Finder History iOS iOS 12 iOS App Mac Mac App Mac OS 9 macOS 10.14 Mojave PCalc Tesla WordPress
Margaret Hamilton (via Hacker News):
There were two onboard computers – one on the command module, Columbia, and one on the lunar module, Eagle. Our task included developing the software to run on each and the systems software they shared. At the beginning, nobody thought software was that big a deal. But then they began to realise how much they were relying on it. The group grew so there were approximately 100 software engineers on my team. Astronauts’ lives were at stake. Our software needed to be ultra-reliable and it needed to be able to detect an error and recover from it at any time during the mission. And it all had to fit on the hardware.
[…]
Just as the astronauts were about to land, the software’s priority displays interrupted them with alarms to warn there was an emergency, and that the computer was overloaded. I learned about it as it was happening, standing in the monitoring room at MIT. We pieced together afterwards what had happened, which was that a radar switch was in the wrong position and it was taking up processing power. It quickly became clear the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem but was compensating for it – restarting and re-establishing the highest priority tasks. The error detection and recovery mechanisms had come to the rescue. It was a total relief when they landed – both that the astronauts were safe, and that the software worked perfectly.
[…]
During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Though in fact we had a complex system of systems, we weren’t getting credit for what was a legitimate field. It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: “Hey, we’re engineering too.” It was an ongoing joke for a long time. Then one day in a meeting, one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone that he agreed with me. The process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware.
donnie:
The entire Apollo 11 computer code is available on @github, and it’s incredible.
Don Eyles:
The Apollo 11 mission succeeded in landing on the moon despite two computer-related problems that affected the Lunar Module during the powered descent. An uncorrected problem in the rendezvous radar interface stole approximately 13% of the computer’s duty cycle, resulting in five program alarms and software restarts. In a less well-known problem, caused by erroneous data, the thrust of the LM’s descent engine fluctuated wildly because the throttle control algorithm was only marginally stable. The explanation of these problems provides an opportunity to describe the operating system of the Apollo flight computers and the lunar landing guidance software.
Jason Kottke:
With the 50th anniversary of the first crewed landing on the Moon fast approaching, I thought I’d share one of my favorite views of the Moon walk, a map of where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, superimposed over a baseball field (bigger). The Lunar Module is parked on the pitcher’s mound and you can see where the two astronauts walked, set up cameras, collected samples, and did experiments.
Graham Roberts:
50 yrs ago, Apollo 11 returned to Earth with rolls of film containing iconic images: a boot print on the moon, a wrinkled U.S. flag, and a portrait of Buzz Aldrin with Neil Armstrong. Today @nytimes offers a perspective like never before.
Our inspiration came from a map originally created by NASA in 1970 that pinpoints the location and direction of every photo taken during this first moonwalk.
@kartpat, an editor on the Immersive team, wrote a custom program to determine how the moonwalk photographs were oriented in space. For each photo, he calculated the height of the camera, its direction and tilt, and the field of view of the lens.
The result: you can stand where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were standing when they took these historic photographs. This three-part interactive article uses real-time 3-D graphics and Augmented Reality to bring it all together.
Jeremy Deaton (via Paul Kafasis):
Though almost no one knew it at the time, the mission had nearly ended in disaster. It was spared only at the last minute by two canny meteorologists with access to a top-secret weather satellite.
[…]
The storm, with its towering clouds and powerful winds, threatened to tear apart the parachutes on the command module on its descent into the Pacific.
Previously:
Update (2021-01-07): Jason Kottke:
On July 20, 1969, 50 years ago today, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 11th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a small B&W television, synced to the present-day time. Just open this page in your browser today, July 20th, and the coverage will start playing at the proper time.
Ken Shirriff:
The software to land on the Moon was woven by hand into core rope memory: wire through a core for a 1 bit, around a core for a 0 bit. Apollo Guidance Computer’s ropes held 36K of 15-bit words and used the first amplifier integrated circuits.
Cara Giaimo:
So in 1964, when [Margaret Hamilton] saw an ad from the MIT Instrumentation Lab recruiting programmers to work on software for what would become the Apollo program, Hamilton jumped at the chance. Initially, she was assigned what was presumed to be a low-impact project, writing the code that would kick in if an unmanned mission aborted. The higher-ups were “so sure this wasn’t going to happen,” she says, that she actually named her program “Forget It.” (When one of these missions did abort, she found herself in high demand.)
Scottie Andrew and Katherine Dillinger:
On Thursday, Google unveiled a giant tribute to Hamilton in California’s Mojave Desert: More than 107,000 mirrors were positioned to reflect moonlight and form her image for one night.
Jen Fitzpatrick:
The tribute was created by positioning over 107,000 mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 1.4-square-mile portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.
Jason Kottke:
50 years ago, the Sony TC-50 cassette player and recorder accompanied the Apollo 11 crew to the Moon and back. Ten years later, the company came out with the Walkman, the first portable cassette player that struck a chord with consumers. In this video, Mat of Techmoan shows us the TC-50 and shows how similar it is to the later Walkman.
Jordan Merrick:
For the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Todd Douglas Miller’s breathtaking film of the Apollo 11 mission that’s comprised entirely of archive footage is essential viewing for all mankind.
Alexis Gallagher:
Interesting article on the Apollo 11 guidance computer.
Ken Shirriff (via Hacker News):
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. At a time when most computers filled rooms, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) took up just a cubic foot. This blog post discusses the small but complex switching power supplies that helped make the AGC compact enough to fit onboard the spacecraft.
Augmented Reality History Interview Programming
Jake Edge (via Hacker News):
Out of that came a new operator, however, that is often called the “walrus
operator” due to its visual appearance. Using “:=“ in an
if or while statement allows assigning a value to a
variable while testing
it.
[…]
The f-strings (or formatted strings) added
into Python 3.6 are quite useful, but Pythonistas often found that they
were using them the same way in debugging output. So Eric V. Smith proposed
some additional syntax for f-strings to help with debugging output.
[…]
Another change for 3.8 affords pure-Python functions the same options for
parameters that those implemented in C already have. PEP 570 (“Python
Positional-Only Parameters”) introduces new syntax that can be used in
function definitions to denote positional-only
arguments—parameters that cannot be passed as keyword arguments.
Previously:
Language Design Programming Python
Brian X. Chen:
Ultimately, the technology did not help me sleep more. It didn’t reveal anything that I didn’t already know, which is that I average about five and a half hours of slumber a night. And the data did not help me answer what I should do about my particular sleep problems. In fact, I’ve felt grumpier since I started these tests.
That mirrored the conclusions of a recent study from Rush University Medical College and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Researchers there noticed patients complaining about sleep data collected by apps and devices from Nike, Apple, Fitbit and others.
In their study, the researchers warned that sleep-tracking tech could provide inaccurate data and worsen insomnia by making people obsessed with achieving perfect slumber, a condition they called orthosomnia. It was one of the latest pieces of research supporting the idea that health apps don’t necessarily make people healthier.
Apple Watch Fitbit HealthKit Sleep
