Moon Machines

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"Moon Machines: The Navigation Computer", is a documentary that explains a little more about the story of when the man first set foot on the moon and how programmers got involved to make this project possible. 

Right after watching it, many questions came to my mind. If we landed on the moon, why can't we go somewhere further away? What things are above us? There's one answer to that, we have to think big just as they did. A big idea requires a big number of people involved and this was not the exception, getting involved more than 400,000 people might sound a little crazy but landing on the moon wouldn't be possible without them. But sometimes when you have to do something big you need extra help, and this is something that I found really interesting, how NASA made a contract with the MIT because it is not something really common that an organization as big as NASA needs some extra help. 

Now let's talk about our area and this project, there were many programmers involved in the project and they worked really hard on it to the point where they lost their families because of the work but also, with this video I could found many significant differences between programming today and programming before. These differences are notorious in the computational timeshare and software, both of them had to evolve in order to satisfy NASA needs. Hardware has also evolved, NASA had a memory limit of 72 KB, nothing compared to what we have nowadays, this was a challenge because programmers had to make code that does not exceed that memory. 

I think that every area in this project was extremely important, without them this wouldn't be possible, especially without engineers and being more specific without software engineers because they did the most difficult part, build the program with the limited resources of their time and making the code as functional as possible that made the man set foot on the moon. But let's not just stop there, we have to continue thinking big.

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