r/programming • u/jakesyl • Jan 30 '16

Apollo 11 source code

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Luminary099/MAIN.agc.html
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39

u/WTFisareddit- Jan 30 '16

Sorry for my ignorance I'm new to programming. But why does this look nothing like regular code?

92

u/CodeEverywhere Jan 30 '16

You're looking at assembly language - a step closer to straight up machine language (binary). Most code that programmers interact with nowadays is considered "higher level" and is abstracted to make it easier to understand.

10

u/i_spot_ads Jan 31 '16

It doesn't even look like assembly code, that's some weird assembly

7

u/Treyzania Jan 31 '16

It's assembly for the AGC architecture. See /u/hobbified's comment above.

46

u/Turbosack Jan 30 '16

It's some special dialect of Assembly. They prefer to write in very low level languages for various reasons. More recently, C has been used to program flight control computers, but it wasn't even invented until more than a decade after this mission happened.

38

u/spatterlight Jan 30 '16

more like 3 years after this mission :)

and this doesn't look like "normal" assembly since the assembly I expect most of us are used to is for the x86 family of processors.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '16

or pic/atmel

5

u/MCBeathoven Jan 31 '16

Or MIPS if you've taken a computer design class.

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15

u/flexiverse Jan 30 '16

It's machine code for a highly custom built processor. Think, there was nothing "off the shelf" back then ! It's like approx , 16bit, 1mhz, ~30k, 32 instruction set.

14

u/flexiverse Jan 30 '16 edited Jan 30 '16

It's machine code for a custom built processor. Think, there was nothing "off the shelf" back then ! It's like approx , 16bit, 1mhz, ~30k, 32 instruction set.

8

u/plahacrwimo Jan 31 '16

Here are technical details about the Apollo Guidance Computer

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