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Apollo Guidance Computer
Trends
- 1
Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions, has died, according to an announcement dated 2026. Hamilton coined the term 'software engineering' and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 for her work on the Apollo guidance computer. Tributes are honouring her foundational role in spaceflight computing.
- 2Running the Apollo 11 Source Code That Reached the Moon●I Ran The Source Code That Took Humans To The Moon (Apollo 11)
A new deep dive walks through the actual guidance computer code from Apollo 11, the NASA program that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface in 1969. By executing the software today, the piece shows how engineers at MIT built a system with tiny memory that still flew humans to the Moon, drawing large attention from software and space enthusiasts.
- 3Running the Apollo 11 Guidance Code on Modern Hardware●The Apollo 11 Code Is Open Source. So I Ran It
The original Apollo 11 onboard guidance computer code, which NASA released as open source, has been run and explored in a new project. The code, written in assembly for the Apollo Guidance Computer that steered the 1969 Moon landing, shows how engineers handled extreme hardware limits, including priority scheduling and a famous 1202 alarm during descent. Enthusiasts are praising it as a fascinating look at pioneering software engineering.