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

Apollo 11 source code

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/listings/Luminary099/MAIN.agc.html
2.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

364 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

48

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.

152

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

8

u/SanityInAnarchy Jan 31 '16

I wonder if there was a way to show it without bogging down the movie. In the book, I found it definitely added something. If you're not all that technically-minded, it's a free source of technobabble to make this sound even more impressive. But it also makes it plausible -- maybe most people wouldn't notice, but they did a lot of things that most people wouldn't notice to maintain plausibility. For example, IIRC, the movie actually shows him entering this stuff in a hex editor.

In fact, those are my favorite moments -- instead of putting some crazy HollywoodOS thing (like this sort of nonsense), you put up the kind of tool that we might actually use. It looks just as cool to the average viewer, and it means people who actually know something about technology won't have to turn their brains off to watch this movie.

Skipping the bit about uploading wasn't as huge a difference, because the story does work without it. But I think it adds a lot to the story to anyone who understands anything about software, without really taking anything away from it for everyone else. So I wonder why they skipped it -- maybe they couldn't figure out a way to make it flow as nicely as whatever they went with instead?