[thewonderidiot]

If I recall correctly, over the course of the program some 300-400 people wrote code for the AGC, so it's not surprising that not everybody gets mentioned. Don Eyles (who saved Apollo 14) has an MIT org chart from the time of Apollo 11 on his website: http://www.doneyles.com/LM/ORG/index.html That only includes people at MIT that worked on it -- there were also many at Raytheon, AC Electronics, and various other contractors (like Adams Associates) that we don't know the names of.

The code that kept Apollo 11 going was Hal Laning's, and he's mentioned a lot in the article.

[Sharlin]

> who saved Apollo 14

For reference, I presume you're referring to how the LM computer was monkey-patched to ignore an abort signal from a faulty switch? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14#Lunar_descent

[thewonderidiot]

Yep, that's right -- Don was the guy who came up with that procedure.

[jfoutz]

I suspect that's the same Eyles with (i'm guessing) Peter Adler who wrote the ignition system.

I don't find apollo source particularly enlightening, but i love the title and comments - BURN BABY BURN [1]

Noli se tangere - don't touch me.

Honi soit qui mal y pense - May he be shamed who thinks badly of it.

[1] https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...

[thewonderidiot]

Indeed! He has a fun anecdote on his website [1] about the throttle control routines, which he was responsible for. His account of it is worth reading, but long story short: The ICD for the descent engine specified that its throttle response time was 0.3 seconds, and so that's what the simulator hardware implemented. Don discovered, through testing, that he only needed to code in 0.2 seconds to get a clean throttle control, and so he opted to not give it any more compensation than needed.

At some point, though, the throttle response time for the descent engine was improved from 0.3 seconds to 0.075 seconds, but the ICD was not updated. So at least Apollo 10-13* all flew with 0.2 seconds of compensation. As it turns outs, the throttle was just barely stable with this much, and if Don had implemented the specified 0.3 second compensation it wouldn't have worked.

Apollo 15-17 (and likely Apollo 14) all had this issue corrected. You can see the difference in the constant THROTLAG comparing the Apollo 13 [2] and Apollo 15-17 [3] lunar module source.

* We haven't yet found a copy of the Apollo 9 or Apollo 14 flight software, so I can't definitively say that either had the error. We do have Apollo 5 source, but THROTLAG, the constant in question, does not have the same name there, and I'm not sure what the equivalent value is.

[1] http://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html (towards the bottom)

[2] https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc/blob/master/Luminar...

[3] https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc/blob/master/Luminar...