Monday, August 25, 2014

Found Items: Software artifacts of NASA's Apollo Space Program

I was searching, yesterday, searching for a reference item, denoting -- in "web text" -- the relation between DARPA and MIT CADR, in the 1980s. I found, in that search: An item of reference at Y Combinator's Hacker NewsSource code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (ibiblio.org).  Of course, I might feel both stunned and well cheered that such a resource would be available, as an open source item now officially in the public domain. Although I am not personally involved in any NewSpace projects for human spaceflight, and neither am I under the employ of any specific asteroid prospecting/asteroid mining company, but I think it's some intriguing news, nonetheless. To my understanding: The Apollo program set a precedent in human spaceflight.

I wish -- how I wish -- that I could draft up a SysML model of that source code, immediately. Sure, it might not readily become to a UML (i.e. UML4SysML) class diagram and neither to a ready description of a finite state machine, but I can at least understand it enough to define UML Stereotypes, such as <>, <>, and <>, so far as to define a UML profile for assembly language, then to apply the same UML profile -- in what would be the same's first real world "Use case," as such --  namely to derive a finite state machine and a corresponding class model of the same source code.

"Archaic" though it might seem in its Assembler format, that source code represents knowledge.

So, for future reference, I note it here as such.

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