We are currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the two most important missions in the entire Apollo sequence: A8 (humankind’s first visit to the moon, and by far the most recklessly ambitious mission in NASA’s history) and A11 (the lunar landing and still the sexiest space mission thus far). To achieve the precision needed to fly between celestial bodies, Apollo had to use computers to perform the key navigation operations -- with “fly-by-wire” replacing the traditional manual “fly-by-stick” piloting. Stunning innovations in both hardware and software were necessary to construct the Apollo Guidance Computer. Leading the entire AGC software team was Margaret Hamilton, who is credited with having created the concept of “software engineering”. Margaret’s special attention to fault tolerance was both pioneering and hugely responsible for the first successful lunar landing. Yet the popular press’ representations of Apollo 11’s “computer malfunctions” that occurred during that landing are misleading -- hiding both the root cause of the problems and the role the computer played in saving the mission. In this talk, I’ll describe how the AGC was used in both A8 and A11, and together we will “re-live” that 12-minute lunar descent so we can study how the AGC’s fault tolerance saved that mission. Feel free to visit http://www.sklardevelopment.com/apollo for a quick “trailer” video.

Presenter Bio

David Sklar, Tumblr

As a boy at the tender age of 8, space-obsessed in the same way kids today are dinosaur-crazy, David watched the Apollo 8 live broadcasts on his family’s B&W TV set and dreamed astronaut-wannabe dreams. Space travel never ended up on his agenda, replaced by a passion for computer science. After receiving a Masters of Computer Science at Brown University in 1983 under the direction of legendary computer-graphics pioneer Andy van Dam, David performed a short stint at Bell Laboratories building visualization aids for VLSI chip designers. He then returned to Brown’s CS department as Lecturer for five years, before diving headfirst into an early commercial hypertext venture as one of the first employees of Electronic Book Technologies, creating electronic books in the pre-PDF era. Sklar continued his relationship with Prof. van Dam for decades, collaborating on two editions of the famous “Computer Graphics - Principles and Practice” textbook. That EBT startup was just the start of a decades-long series of startup ventures, including experiences creating apps for the media-sales and construction-management industries. His most-recent startup effort was acquired by Yahoo/Verizon in 2014, and he is still part of that family, currently constructing real-time data-analytics pipelines for Tumblr.