![]() The priority alarm displays were a reminder to the astronauts to put the radar switch back to where it belonged. Just before landing on the moon, the Apollo 11 computer, as a result of the rendezvous radar switch having been left on, became overloaded. For the first time, the new displays warned the astronauts in the case of an emergency by interrupting their normal mission displays and replacing them with priority alarms. The Priority Displays interface routines gave the software the ability to communicate asynchronously in real time with the astronauts. It was up to the team to determine the relative importance of each process and to assign to it a unique priority to ensure that all events would occur in the correct order and time relative to everything else going on. ![]() ![]() Updates were continuously being submitted into the software over time and over many releases for each and every mission (when software for one mission was often being worked on concurrently with software for other missions) making sure everything would play together and that the software would successfully interface to and work together with all the other systems for each mission.īecause the onboard flight software for the manned missions was asynchronous, it had the flexibility to handle the unpredictable: higher priority jobs interrupted lower priority jobs, based on events as they happened. The software engineers created the overall design of the software structure (the “glue”) that held everything together as an integrated system of systems. The systems software included the design and development of the error detection and recovery programs such as restarts and the Display-Interface-Routines' Priority Displays. The task at hand for the software people (the "software engineers"): develop the software for the Command Module (CM), the Lunar Module (LM) and the systems software (used by and residing in both the CM and the LM). The software was developed by the software people, a new breed of engineer. The on-board flight software team led by Margaret Hamilton developed the software on the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) that took humans to the moon and back. In her effort to help astronauts get to the Moon safely, Margaret Hamilton invented the new field of “software engineering.” How did her work help Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the Moon? The mission to send a person to the Moon and have them return to Earth safely required the invention of not only new technologies, but new ways of approaching scientific problems.
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