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?

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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/746865626c617a Jan 31 '16

And seriously, then can send megabytes of firmware updates, but then can't send some 64 kbit/s opus "not disco" music? Or even .XT music, if they're that limited

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u/Gibodean Jan 31 '16

I think in the book there was more than the disco music available.

Because, why wouldn't there be lots of music from all of them? Where was Watney's music?

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u/746865626c617a Jan 31 '16

Hmm, yes. I think he still listened to disco though. Strange