Comment by davidw
6 years ago
Wow, was "burn baby burn" really part of the original source code?!
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
6 years ago
Wow, was "burn baby burn" really part of the original source code?!
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
Line 34:
> At the get-together of the AGC developers celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first moonwalk, Don Eyles (one of the authors of this routine along with Peter Adler) has related to us a little interesting history behind the naming of the routine.
It's kind of frustrating to try and figure out what is actually the original, unaltered code, and what's been added.
There is a BURNBABY routine, though, so I guess that's real.
Wherever we added modern comments, they are denoted by a double hashtag (##) at the beginning of the line. Everything else, minus formatting concerns, is directly from the original listing. You can see the scans we transcribed this from here:
https://archive.org/details/Comanche55J2k60
https://archive.org/details/Luminary99001J2k60
The whole line is not as shocking
It makes sense in context, of course, I just didn't think of NASA in the late 60ies as the sort of place where you could write 'clever' things like that.
Back when AS/400s were AS/400s, I made a little tool to help the operators run a long process at night. I felt playful and left an easter egg: on Fridays the 13th, it would work as usual, but display a skull and bones with blinking red eyes while doing it.
It seems that Fridays the 13th are rarer than I estimated, because months later my boss woke me up at midnight because the operators had woken her up because it was the first time the egg was triggered. In hindsight, it was a foolish thing to add since this was a bank. Fortunately they took it with good humor, and even kept the easter egg to scare new people.
I suppose NASA is more formal than a bank, so they only let you fool around with the comments.