


12 videos · 8 hr 8 minCurated by HackerTube · 12 videos · 8 hr 8 min
Hacker News loves a war story about software you can't touch, and spacecraft are the most extreme case. This playlist runs roughly in order of history: two ways into the Apollo Guidance Computer, the restoration of a real one, then Voyager's 1970s computers, a Lisp REPL on Deep Space 1, a visit to the antenna that still talks to Voyager, and the 2023 rescue of Voyager 1. It ends with the photo Voyager took on its way out.
Play all on YouTubeTNMoC · 2.8M views · 6 years ago
The way in: Robert Wills explains the AGC and then walks through the Apollo 11 landing step by step, 1202 alarms included, and HN keeps calling it mandatory viewing.
media.ccc.de · 324K views · 8 years ago
Once the landing story makes sense, Steil and Hessmann go through the whole machine layer by layer, from hardware to OS to mission software, which commenters call the most complete AGC talk there is.
CuriousMarc · 588K views · 7 years ago
Now you see the real thing: CuriousMarc and Mike Stewart open a privately owned AGC in a Houston hotel-room lab, the first episode of a series HN recommends whole.
CuriousMarc · 759K views · 3 years ago
Thirty episodes later, the team builds a reader to recover lost programs from core rope memory, which a commenter calls the deepest dive on rope ROM anywhere.
Applied Science · 522K views · 7 years ago
A maker interlude before Voyager: Applied Science rebuilds the astronauts' electroluminescent display panel from scratch, so you see the other end of the AGC too.
Strange Loop Conference · 349K views · 7 years ago
Moves from 1969 to 1977: a Strange Loop tour of the three computer systems that still fly Voyager, and why they have lasted so long.
Google TechTalks · 23K views · 14 years ago
Ron Garret's first-hand account of finding a race condition in Lisp on Deep Space 1 through a live REPL in 1999, which HN cites in nearly every thread about remote REPLs.
EEVdiscover · 93K views · 9 years ago
Before the rescue story, see the other end of the link: EEVblog's Dave Jones tours the 70m DSS-43 dish in Canberra with its operations supervisor.
EEVdiscover · 75K views · 9 years ago
Inside the control room, with live spectrum displays of a signal that left the spacecraft about a day earlier.
!!Con · 8K views · 2 years ago
A short, lively version of the 2023 telemetry failure from someone on the team, covering 1970s architecture and documentation that had gone missing.
Flight Software Workshop · 17K views · 1 year ago
The full engineering version for flight-software people: no simulator, a failed memory chip, and code relocated around it, which one commenter called mind-blowing reverse engineering.
carlsagandotcom · 8.8M views · 17 years ago
The closer: Voyager 1 took this photo of Earth in 1990 on its way out, and HN commenters say they rewatch Sagan's three minutes about it every so often.