Moon Machines


To be honest I didn’t have an idea of how important the whole Apollo project was to the software world and vice versa.  I was already aware to a point that it had helped the computer hardware industry to develop great achievements and progress on the technology to be used because of the challenging requirements, but I did not expect it to play such an important part to the software engineering development as it was presented in here.
It was shocking how the project pushed the software development so far it had to evolve. To fit the requirements of complexity and size, they laid the ground for preemptive scheduling and process priority that is used now in our computers. The gyroscopes we nowadays have in lots of our devices.
The project was also important in the aspect that it brought up some of the most important issues about software development we have to these days, like how they began not knowing what to do, that requirements were needed, the importance they had to assign to them, the importance of testing, be alert and ready in order to solve errors and to know where they came from and the problem of being up to date with the project deadlines. It rang a bell on me how, to finish the project in time, the engineers and people working on the project gave up their personal lives to the point several of them getting divorced because of it.
I think that the most important contribution of this whole project, besides the technological advances it brought, is that it put on perspective the need of software project management and of best practices, because before that, there were never considerations about the potential problems that software developers could face in general. I truly admire the people of MIT for venturing into this crucial delicate project without previous background they could access, and being pioneers of the modern software development.

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