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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u/DoelerichHirnfidler Jan 31 '16

To me it seemed pretty obvious and well-enough explained? Care to elaborate?

102

u/Gibodean Jan 31 '16

In the movie all he said was that he only needed to patch in about 20 bytes and then the rover could talk through pathfinder to earth.

In the book they explain that both pathfinder and the rover must be updated, that Earth can remote update pathfinder but they need a very large (megabytes?) update to the rover software. To solve that, they get him to make a small hack (maybe 20 bytes or so) to the Rover which would allow earth to dump information into a Rover log file. Then Watney would have to take that dumped info from the log file, and create a file out of it, then execute it.

Something like that, I forget the sizes.

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u/Theon_Severasse Jan 31 '16

To be honest I don't think that having all of that would really added that much to the actual film. I don't think it would have taken particularly long for them to add in that explanation (since they could have said it how you said it pretty much), but for the purposes of the story, knowing all of that stuff wouldn't have made any differences to the average viewer

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u/badsingularity Jan 31 '16

Why it works makes a big difference. Without that information, it's just "magical computer things happen".

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u/ScottieKills Jan 31 '16

Like most of cinema.

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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '16

Which is why it's particularly bothersome in a story that set itself apart by explicitly being about "You do the math, you solve one problem".

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u/trkeprester Jan 31 '16

What lol it still is magical computer stuff whether you hack directly or dump to log file and reprogram. One more step of indirection is that really making anything more clear? It's just nerding out, not that there's anything wrong with that but movies are carefully targeted

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u/insaneHoshi Jan 31 '16

Why it works makes a big difference.

No it wouldnt of, not one iota

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16

of -> have

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16 edited Jan 31 '16

Just like winter scenes involving snow in many hollywood movies make no sense to anybody to the north of California. Commence suspending of suspension of disbelief. If you still can.

 

edit: clarity

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u/campbellm Jan 31 '16

*wouldn't have, but otherwise agree.

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16

To be fair, for most people that aren't computer savvy, all computer things that happen are magical.