[bluetomcat]

Interesting fact: the listings contain comments indicating page numbers in the form of "# Page [number]". To find the maximum page number, I ran the following one-liner:

    $ awk '/# Page / { print $3 }' Apollo-11/*.s | sort -gr | head -1
    1516

It is often speculated that in the famous photo, Margaret Hamilton is standing next to the pile of the complete source code. However, 1516 pages are far from such a high pile. I wonder, aren't these books just containing different revisions of the code, or maybe not all of the code has been published?

[rca]

Apparently the AGC only had 36,864 words of rom. Looking at a random file from the github repo, each page seems to contain 50 lines. So if you put one instruction (one word) per line you could fit the whole rom inside 738 pages (assuming there's no optimization during assembly). Add some space for the comments and blank lines, and 1516 seems about right.

In any case it's doubtful a single program spanning the whole pile could fit in the AGC rom.

[trynewideas]

Per this interview between Hamilton and Jaime Rubio Hancock (https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who...):

> Q: Was this picture taken during the Apollo project development? When was it taken and who took it?

> A: Here is a description of the photo excerpted from an MIT Draper Lab document:

> > “Taken by the Draper Lab photographer in 1969 (during Apollo 11). Here, Margaret is shown standing beside listings of the software developed by the team she was in charge of, the LM and CM on-board flight software team”.

Hamilton again, in this Vox interview (http://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481/margaret-hamilton-apoll...):

> "In this picture, I am standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code," Hamilton says in an email. "To clarify, there are no other kinds of printouts, like debugging printouts, or logs, or what have you, in the picture."

[trynewideas]

There's also the people who reportedly spoke to Ron Hackler about the photo[1][2], who notes that "they wrote all of the AGC source code on AGC source coding paper".

Such sheets would look like this: http://www.eah-jena.de/~kleine/history/software/IBM360-codin...

And would likely be much less dense than the printouts.

[1] Steve Dolha on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Was-this-pile-of-code-written-by-a-sin...

[2] This imgur post: https://www.quora.com/Was-this-pile-of-code-written-by-a-sin...

[jakub_h]

Certainly different revisions (for different missions). Also remember that surface missions required two different versions of the code: One for the CM and one for the LM.

[trynewideas]

The repo bluetomcat awk'd covers both Luminary (LM) and Comanche (CM).

EDIT: I bet he awk'd it before the repo split the files up; each is more than 1,400 pages. The total number is likely closer to 3,000.