I've presented at the Code Camp before. I'm a Microsoft MVP interested in the history of computing.
This paper laid the groundwork for the theory of computation and established the limits of what can be computed. It introduced the world to the Turing machine.
Computers have been around since the 1940's and so has programming in one form or another. But what was it like to be a programmer before the Internet, before the PC, before stackoverflow and before the gaming graphic card? Let's take the Tardis and find out.
Charles Babbage was an English polymath who designed an "Analytical Engine" in the 1840's. He believed that this machine could do fully-fledged general purpose computation. Ada Lovelace helped him document the workings but quickly came to realise the implications of this design.
She realised that anything that could be represented symbolically; numbers, logic, even music could pass through the machine and create "magic".
The "Analytical Engine" represents the dawn of the computer age. To demonstrate its working, Ada wrote mathematical proofs that many people believe are the first computer programs.
This is their story.
50 years ago, the AGC guided Apollo 8 on its voyage around the moon. The AGC was the principal onboard computer for NASA's Apollo missions, including all of the lunar landings. Both the Command Module and the Lunar Module had AGCs, so two AGCs were used on most of the Apollo missions, but with differing software. The talk will cover a brief overview of the moon missions and the Saturn 5 rocket to place the AGC in context and then look at the hardware and software of the AGC and its effect on Apollo 11 and 14.
