"if we don't get to the moon we are going to end up half way or twice as far....." Reference to floating-point math (or lack thereof) within the program. Fantastic!

I'm going to miss following along with such an ambitious project now that it's over

Brilliant people who overcame the limitations of those early computers. We now have computer aided this and computer aided that but they had nothing but their amazing minds. Hats off to them, words can't express how much respect they deserve. In the future they will be looked upon as the geniuses they were.

I love how you cut to other clips to help us understand. Very good piece indeed.

Excellent description by Mr. Lickly of the challenges they faced, problems solved. Intelligent and knowledgeable people like these can interweave humor into a technical discussion seamlessly. Excellent composition and editing by you as always.

i was interested to hear that dan worked on the polaris guidance system. my grandfather worked on the electromechanical parts of the same guidance system and was invited to work on the apollo program, but declined because he didn't want to work in florida again as he didn't like the weather there, and ended up going to work at ford aerospace instead. if he had decided to go work on the apollo program, i never would have been born.

Dan Lickly still sharp as tac. It's amazing he still remembers all that.

Thanks Marc. Was starting to get worried there wouldn't be more of these.

These guys are legends but have the same geeky humor we all nerds have. Brilliant.

Such awesame discussions. Thanks for the diffusion of it. No other way to see those genius. Ha... excellent post-production Marc 😬👍👍👏👏

This series is so great.

It's good to see Don Knuth is still out and about. The last and only time I spoke to him was in 2002 at the University of Oslo.

Nice to explain the asymmetric center of gravity for control. Thanks for such great content!

It's almost unimaginable to most people today how precious and limited the computing capabilities were back in that time. Today, we walk around with multi-core networked supercomputers in our pockets, with orders of magnitude more computing capacity that was used to design nuclear weapons back in the day. But the cat videos look really great! The controller in your inkjet printer is closer in capacity to the AGC..

Thanks for sharing .

I was waiting for so long for another episode of AGC series!! This made my day!! Edit: After watching your till 0:45, I would like to tell you a thing: you and your team and Donald Knuth book's (also his interview) inspired me a lot to understand how computers work at the basic level and how one must write programs. Inspired by your SC/MP computer video, I started learning assembly language of AVR microcontrollers myself and just yesterday I made a little "kit" to program Atmega8A using toggle switches. I call it as Edith Mark I (imgur.com/a/HY3NtxN). I will make a better version of it, for sending 8 bytes for instruction is tough. Probably later I will work with programming 8085 in a similar fashion. So, lots of _Thank You_ to you, your team and Donald Knuth.🙇🙇🙂

Thankyou for this video :-)

Perfect for my morning coffee.

Breakfast with CuriosMarc, perfect 👌🏼

Hooray for a new CuriousMarc video!

Thank you Marc :-)

Oh man. The part about Apollo 4 & 6. Talking about launching out of orbit then thrusting back towards Earth to reach lunar return velocities in order to test heat shields and stability. I never knew they did such tests during Apollo, but I absolutely did the same exact kind of tests preparing for missions in Kerbal Space Program. I'm not sure exactly what this means, but I really had a moment as he was describing those details.

I bought the book!

Woah! At 2:29 you can hear MF tones bleeding across from an adjacent trunk line!

You met Donald Knuth!! :)

3:37 Not a phrase you hear everyday...

You are so lucky.

Just love this shit.

0:50 Mike is melting

A day off, breakfast in bed & Marc. What more do you need ?!!

6:22 Wonder if Mr Simonyi is thinking "...now if only they had used my awesome Hungarian Notation..." :)

What/where available is the portable AGC he was using right at the end of the video??

There was no maths co processor you could plug into the AGC back then haha.

0.5 Hz clock speed? It’s amazing it could make all those reentry adjustments

2:28 Is there a purpose for these MF tones? They sound faster than the ones used in the telephone network.

I watched the whole Video in the link.. VERY interesting but I hope hat there are more Videos being made or that the developers write down morre of the Story before it´s too late… what the Video did not Show us were the real struggles they had.. how they came to Solutions..why they decided to do it like this and not different.. I mean that for both Hardware and Software.. how close were they to give up.. were there any critical issues that almost made the Programm fail etc tec.. I mean thousands of People worked on that thing for years.. I`m sure there`s much much more to tell… Who decided to go for a modular Computer... the Story About potting etc etc: For me personally difficult to understand how so many People worked on that for so Long... what did a programmer or Hardware guy do every day :)) BTW, where are the AGCs today that flew the entry and returned to earth ?

19:46 Hahaha

No floating point.... yup, been there... Parallax's BS2 PStamp runs PBASIC - Parallax's BASIC interpreter - it does not do floating point so you have to scale things for integer math and scale them back when done. It's a real pain in the butt. You normalized all your values based on the number of places past the decimal point (precision), typically 3. So if you had the constant Pi of 3.142, you made that constant 3142 in code (1000 times entered, not calculated). Then, if you needed to multiply it by 2, just multiply it by 2 to get 6284 and then divide by 1000 to get 6 (you lose the precision unless you left it scaled by 1000). If you needed to multiply Pi by 2.5, that would be 3142 X 2500 / 1000 to get 7855 which you could leave as is, treating the last 3 digits as being past the decimal point, or divide again by 1000 to get 7 (the integer value losing the factional part - there is no rounding).

Lickly jokes "what's reentry"" but it's unlikely he didn't know what reentry was after working on guidance for an IRBM.

The 1st real personal computer was not the Apple but the Altair 8800 by MITS.

I just don't know if we could do this now. It would be quite hard to do this right now.

Efficient programmers. Bitwise wizards.