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Mike Steward decided to recover the original Apollo guidance computer programs that landed man on the Moon in the 1960’s. Unfortunately some of them seem to have been lost to history.

It turns out, chunks of the original hardware still exist – such as the rope core memory which contained the programs. The next question is, how do you read these programs off 50 year old rope core memory hardware? This video below tells you how he did it!

He even wrote a web app that simulates how core memory works. We do a decent job recording history’s events, but I think it’s extremely cool that this kind of historical technical information is not being lost to the ages.

You can also check out the many other videos about the Apollo guidance computer in the other parts of his videos – or a previous article which has a super-awesome description of how Apollo computers work by Robert Wills.

Veritasium does a great overview of maze-solving robots. He goes over the different algorithms as well as optimizations that weren’t optimal, but were faster because the mechanics of the path made it faster for the physics of the robots. There were also unique optimizations that take advantage of diagonals, gyroscopes, suction to make 6G turns, and other ideas.

It’s a reminder that even when something seems solved, there is likely huge optimizations still waiting to be discovered.

But then again, you can go the other direction and try to build the most unskilled robot. Hebocon celebrates unskilled robot builders – even penalizing those who try too hard or using proper technology.

“There is almost no reason to re-write a huge software codebase from scratch. If anything, evaluate wrapping it with an emulator that can filter for the things you want to change before a re-write.”

-Me (inspired by Joel Spolsky)

javidx9 walks us through his 3 month adventure writing a NES emulator in C++. He does a great job walking through the topics with beginner friendly explanations and good production values of diagrams and coding.

Other resources:

• https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Nesdev_Wiki

Emacs takes a lifetime to learn. So the sooner you start, the longer it will take.

Are you a programmer’s programmer? A man among men? Have people written epic poems about your coding? If not, maybe you should be as cool as ‘The Story of Mel‘.

The stories of Melvin Kaye have become part of programming folklore. Little is actually known of him beyond the fact he did lots of interesting programming with a very early Royal McBee LGP-30. He eschewed optimizing compilers and hand-crafted his code to take advantage of the most esoteric hardware quirks – such as using the LGP-30’s drum memory rotation speed to write delay loops in his code.

Maybe give one of his be-fabled stories a read. Or perhaps one of his other stories.