
Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971) - astdb
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/don-eyles-extra-weird-looking-freak-saves-apollo-14-40737/
======
thewonderidiot
Don is still around, and is still awesome! His memory for events around that
time is surprisingly sharp, for it being 50 years ago.

He's been an invaluable resource for us at the VirtualAGC project [1]. He
provided over half (!) of the AGC programs we've made available, including LM
software for Apollo 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15-17, plus several other ground
development programs. He also was the source of a majority of the schematics
that we used in the AGC restoration [2] -- I can say with 100% confidence that
it wouldn't have been possible to get that computer working again without his
help.

He's got a book out now, Sunburst and Luminary [3], that is very good and goes
into a lot of technical detail on the LM software, without getting too much
into the weeds. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of
thing!

[1] [http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/](http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb59FWrLZfdlisi_x7-Ut_-w7)

[3]
[https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html](https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html)

~~~
zweizeichen
Mike, thanks a lot for working on the restoration project! It was amazing to
watch your progress and the ingenious tools and solutions you guys came up
with. It also sparked my interest in AGC-related things and while I at first
expected it to be a somewhat simple and elegant machine (easier to formally
verify) I quickly realized it too like almost any engineering project was
subject to reality/deadline-driven compromises everywhere (looking at you
memory architecture). However, it is a machine which still 'fits in your head'
compared to the historical achievement. We probably won't be able to do that
kind of thing with the more recently developed, more complex systems we're
going to use for the next steps in space exploration.

------
jkaptur
> What NASA needs most, he says, is some imaginative PR... The astronauts he
> has met could provide reams of picturesque copy; they are hard-drinking,
> fast-living, generally “wild and weird.”

The editor of Rolling Stone was certainly paying attention! It sounds like
they sent Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo just a short time after publishing this.
His book, The Right Stuff, would cement the image of those first American
astronauts in just this “wild and weird” frame.

~~~
milliondollar
The author was also a minor player in new journalism circles. He wrote "boys
on the bus", an account of working with Hunter S Thompson to cover the 1972
presidential campaign.

------
kingbirdy
Great article. I was curious about the game mentioned towards the bottom:

> At M.I.T. next door to Draper, some of the undergraduates play a game called
> “Space War.” To play “Space War,” you need a television screen, a computer,
> and a working knowledge of Newtonian physics. The TV screen shows a planet
> surrounded by spaceships. Each player fires torpedos from his spaceship,
> aiming them according to the laws of orbital dynamics. The torpedos must
> destroy either another spaceship or the planet. The game is enhanced by
> programming the computer to include such factors as time warps, so that a
> spaceship can disappear “for years.”

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found a few versions of the game
(actually called "Spacewar!"[0]), both the original[1] without time-warp and
the more advanced version described in the article which includes it[2].
However contrary to the article's description it seems only the ships follow
Newtonian physics, the projectiles always travel in a straight line, and I
wasn't able to blow up the star or planet you're orbiting, though perhaps a
version with these features exists and I simply wasn't able to find it.
Interestingly, the circular layout isn't just for the game, the screen of the
PDP-1[3] Which ran it was circular because it was originally a radar screen!

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar%21)

[1]: [https://spacewar.oversigma.com/](https://spacewar.oversigma.com/)

[2]: [https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/](https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1)

~~~
Wingman4l7
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle had a Spacewar tournament a couple years
ago, which I believe also ran on restored hardware.

~~~
yarrel
I visited the LCM a couple of weeks ago and Spacewar was running then, it may
be a permanent exhibit now.

------
greenyoda
Don Eyles has a web site, where there's an interesting article called "Tales
From the Lunar Module Guidance Computer":

[https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html](https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html)

~~~
bovermyer
I was a little surprised to see his home address there.

But that website made me happy. It evokes memories of a simpler era on the
web.

~~~
rst
He's got a space at an artists' cooperative which is divided up into live/work
spaces for a few dozen professional artists (including Don himself, who's now
a professional fine art photographer). So the address is public already in a
whole bunch of other places.

------
eitland
> “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the
> literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor
> poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a
> language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where
> at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol,
> there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of
> discouraging.”

Today computer languages are mostly easier to learn than a totally new human
language I guess.

I still thought this one was quote-worthy.

Also: is it just me or was writing in some ways better before?

~~~
jhbadger
Way easier. It is hardly noteworthy for a programmer to know a half dozen
programming languages well, but a person who knows a half dozen human
languages well is.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
I think the main determining factor here is vocabulary. Modern programming
langs have fairly small #s of reserved words, and when you add the standard
library on top of that, you essentially have all the 'vocab' you need to use
the language well. This is because (a) a large part of programming is the act
of creating new vocab via writing new APIs/libraries/functions, and (b) the
time pressure is significantly lessened; there's no issue with consulting docs
for the interfaces you forget.

Meanwhile, human languages are essentially unusable without a fairly extensive
vocabulary, and importantly a vocabulary that has to be memorized and
available at a moment's notice.

------
72deluxe
There's mention of him in this article regarding the source code (printed on
white and green paper). He wrote about 2000 lines for the Lunar Module.

I often wonder how many lines of Javascript I load every day just to browse
the web and watch images fade in and out and animate etc. and all the
megabytes of framework garbage I load just to display some content. By
comparison, it's depressing.

------
sneak
My favorite part:

> _“Look,” he says, “they’re devoting three billion dollars a year to
> curiosity that might yield good results in the long run, and eighty billion
> a year to the Defense budget — to killing. I’d be for a bigger space budget
> as long as the money came from the Defense budget. That’s the one to cut._

Wish we had more people talking this way these days. Instead, they’re
militarizing space.

~~~
a3n
We do have more people talking this way. The other people aren't listening.

Society might benefit from peaceful pursuits in the long run (and individuals
will in the present), but people with piles of money will make bigger piles of
money from war in the short run.

------
sildur
This is the first time in many many months I’ve read an article from begin to
end, in one sitting. And then I looked the date it was written: 1971.

We don’t have shorter attention spans. We simply cannot handle the utter crap
that passes by articles today.

~~~
gameswithgo
Perhaps the articles from 1971 that get reposted today represent the top 1% of
articles from then, making articles from then seem so much better than now?

~~~
dredmorbius
My experience looking at, say, the front-page (or more likely these days,
inside-page briefings section) of a newspaper, today vs. say 1970, or at an
issue of a leading magazine, is that writing and editorial standards have
changed, largely for the worse.

Newspapers are an easier direct comparison, and though I don't have a specific
example to show (a selection, say, of front pages from the same day of the
month across a span of decades would be useful -- 12 issues a year, enough to
show trends, but not so many as to drown them out -- would be a good
demonstration), but I've done periodic research and am struck.

There are always gradual changes, but a tipping point toward commercialisation
and sheer crassness emerged strongly in the 1990s.

For magazines, the larger problem is that so many simply aren't what they once
were, notably leading US news weeklies. It might be better to consider a set
of political magazines -- _New Republic_ , _National Review_ , _The
Economist_. Possibly _Atlantic_ , _Harpers Weekly_ , and _The New Yorker_.

And perhaps _Rolling Stone_ as well.

There's some survivor's bias, yes. But there's also been a palpable shift.

~~~
endgame
In Australia, our independent public broadcaster reads like a clickbait rag. I
routinely find basic spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in newspapers.
That's not how I used to remember the news.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've seen sharp declines in the BBC and NPR myself. ABC (Australia) is
decidely mixed, I'll grant you that.

------
throwaway13337
So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"?

Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking
feeling today.

~~~
samplatt
The climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate
destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction
event on your doorstep.

~~~
johnnyforeigner
Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of
the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate
change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that
extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex
socio-technical system.

I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a
concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of
their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil
rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to
business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts
of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told
us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial
success and conventional career paths.

~~~
redis_mlc
> there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random
> error

Agreed, I was there and watched the "Duck and Cover" films in school. That
only stopped when leaders realized that surviving the initial blast was one
thing, and surviving a month later for most urbanites was unlikely.

> So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and
> Reagan ... happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of
> financial success

I don't see a coherent argument here.

You can ignore Thatcher, since she was the head of a bankrupted, hapless
country (Britain had food rationing for 9 years after WW2.)

Reagan was one of the most powerful leaders in world history. He wanted a
strong America, both domestically and overseas. Can't really argue with that.
We don't like people who utter words like "Evil Empire" [see Prof. Victor
Davis Hanson], but somebody has to say it. Just be glad Reagan was on our
side.

~~~
chasontherobot
Whose side was Reagan on? He certainly wasn't on the side of a lot of gays,
blacks, or the other minorities his administration threw in jail, poisoned, or
just let die through inaction.

~~~
eadmund
That's just nonsense.

Re. gays, Mr. Reagan signed into law federal outlays of $5.73 billion for AIDS
research and treatment and he opposed California Proposition 6, which would
have fired public-school teachers for advocating homosexuality.

Re. blacks, his administration did push hard for tough-on-crime measures —
measures which were _supported_ by black groups in the 80s. They may or may
not have been wise in retrospect, but they were a well-intended attempt to
support black communities and black people.

~~~
nappy
Where does $5.73 billion come from? I searched and found figures in the
hundreds of millions [1] along with other evidence of the Reagan
administrations indifference to AIDS [2]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/18/us/reagan-defends-
financi...](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/18/us/reagan-defends-financing-
for-aids.html)

[2] [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan-
administratio...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/reagan-
administration-response-to-aids-crisis)

------
annoyingnoob
How do we bring back the national enthusiasm for space again? Enthusiasm that
spans across politics.

Maybe I'm out of touch, it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and
get something flying into space than it used to. I don't think we can be world
leaders with projects like the SLS that never get off the ground anywhere near
the expected date. Seems like we used to take more risks or have less
bureaucracy or ???

~~~
_bxg1
> Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ???

More like we had a Cold War to win via technological showmanship.

Today's world has more important, more fundamental political problems to solve
(not that we're doing a good job on those either, but regardless). At the same
time:

> it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying
> into space than it used to

It's never been easier to "get something flying into space" thanks to,
surprisingly, private industry. Walking on the moon may be a different story,
but significant progress has been made getting both objects and people into
space.

~~~
annoyingnoob
Looking at Wikipedia, maybe its just about money.

"Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968" \- $25.4
billion (1973)

"The Space Launch System (SLS) is a US super heavy-lift expendable launch
vehicle, which has been under development since its announcement in 2011. It
is the primary launch vehicle of NASA's deep space exploration plans,[12][13]
including the planned crewed lunar flights of the Artemis program and a
possible follow-on human mission to Mars.[14][15][16] SLS replaces the
Constellation program's Ares V launch vehicle of 2005, which never left the
development phase." \- For fiscal years 2011 through 2018, the SLS program had
expended funding totaling $13.999 billion in nominal dollars.

In 7 years Apollo had crewed flight. In 7 years SLS isn't even off the ground,
and that is after the previous project never finished.

So, how do we gain public support for funding these missions? Honestly, while
'war' may be an answer its not a good one.

------
smoyer
It's so funny to see an article from 1971 is on the same page as news (and
ads) from 2020. If this were a printed newspaper, people would be very
confused!

~~~
dang
Historical material is particularly welcome on HN. When an article shows up
that's old, has never been discussed here, and strikes chords with the
community, that's the best!

~~~
smoyer
Hopefully it didn't sound like I was complaining! ... I also love that
Saturdays and Sundays have a broader scope of topics making it to the front
page. I do appreciate having the date shown though ... I've read a couple
articles and thought "that seems pretty passe" before I realized I was reading
older materials.

~~~
dang
It didn't sound like you were complaining at all! I just felt like
exuberating.

------
hownottowrite
Don Eyles breaks down his conversations with Apollo astronauts in this TEDx
talk. Really great anecdotes:
[https://tedxbeaconstreet.com/videos/conversations-with-
the-a...](https://tedxbeaconstreet.com/videos/conversations-with-the-apollo-
astronauts/)

"What we had in common was a spirit of exploration." @17:10

------
banku_brougham
Man the culture has changed a lot since the 70s.

Great article.

------
Stratoscope
A recent discussion of straights and freaks:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670128)

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> “They passed a resolution with a lot of whereases and things in my honor.
I was introduced to Monsignor somebody-or-other. I was stoned out of my mind.”

1971\. What can I say :-)

------
sli
Does "weird-looking freak" really just mean "has long hair?"

------
droithomme
What a fantastic article!

------
MichaelMoser123
that ride to the moon seems to have been quite a rough one - at each mission
it needed some hero who had to save the mission...

~~~
hudibras
Ultimately, that's what made them stop: somebody (or most likely, three
somebodies) was going to get killed.

~~~
a3n
Three somebodies did get killed.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1)

------
jimhefferon
Good article. No picture, though.

------
gwbas1c
> Weird-Looking Freak

Where's the picture?

~~~
greenyoda
There are a couple of pictures of Don Eyles and his colleagues from that
period at the bottom of this page on Don's web site:

[https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html](https://doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html)

It looks like in those days, having long hair was what made you a "weird-
looking freak".

------
dilippkumar
> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer
> programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of
> an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the
> literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor
> poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a
> language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where
> at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol,
> there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of
> discouraging.”

As I read this, I was aware that there is a steaming pile of JavaScript a
single Alt-Tab away on my laptop. I think there's a profound lesson here -
buried in the path between these dreams of programmers in the 70s and today's
reality.

This was a really good read. Gave me something to think about.

~~~
SonOfLilit
Whytheluckystiff wrote some Ruby code that can only be described as good
poetry (including at least one project used in production in some places, the
Camping web framework) circa 2005. I'm sure some people write poetry-level
code today (obviously the folks at shadertoy.com, but they're writing in a
classical style, and I'm sure someone's writing code poetry that could not
have been written before 2020).

~~~
SonOfLilit
Oh and obviously TeX will always be considered classic 20th century code
literature.

And probably git too, especially as it's very useful and almost forces the
casual user to appreciate the poetry of its data structures.

~~~
cat199
> And probably git too

Not sure about this, given the fact that this exists::

[https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/](https://git-man-page-
generator.lokaltog.net/)

~~~
SonOfLilit
I recommend reading the first commit in the git git repo

~~~
glenneroo
Would you mind posting it? Or at least a link? I'm not sure where the original
repo is and github doesn't allow sorting commits by date.

~~~
SonOfLilit
sure:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8650483)

------
jakelazaroff
Title correction: there should be an exclamation point after "extra". As in
"extra! extra! read all about it", not "extra weird–looking freak". Although
it did make me laugh :)

~~~
dang
HN's software should probably replace non-trailing exclamation points with
something rather than nothing.

I took the Extra bit out of the title for now, since it isn't needed and I
suppose might confuse younger readers.

~~~
ash
What does this "Extra!" bit mean?

~~~
projektfu
When breaking news came out a newspaper would sometimes publish an extra
edition to go out in the afternoon. The paperboys would stereotypically say,
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

~~~
dang
At some point paperboys will need to be explained also, and some time after
that, newspapers.

~~~
projektfu
You see, we had things called computers, which were like an interface between
you and the network...

------
tbergeron
> Weird-Looking Freak Yet fails to show a picture of the weird looking freak?

~~~
a3n
He was physically described pretty well in the article.

As for "weird" and "freak," you should probably load the 1971 context for full
understanding.

~~~
dkdbejwi383
What is the 1971 context, for this millenial's benefit?

~~~
a3n
Being different was itself weird back then, while it's almost normal now.
Being long haired and stoned and consciousness oriented, among short haired
short sleeved pocket protected engineering units was especially weird.

"Freak" would have been the title editor's attempt to put a particular image
of hippiness into a reader's head, justified or not.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene)

~~~
ssully
Heh, that article is interesting with how much it references Zappa. I am not
his biggest fan, but whenever I hear the word Freak, I think of his song
"Hungry Freaks, Daddy".

~~~
kragen
I'm not the only one who, ever since I opened this article, has been hearing
the lines:

The rising tide

Of the left-behinds

Of the Great Society

(too too too too too tee!)

------
smartsystems
I'm not sute if I'll get much sympathy but I would SO much rather get a
synopsis with maybe a couple bullet points and some relevant pictures (or
graphs!) than an article.

Let articles die. I just want to know what happened. I don't want to read the
history or a flowery introduction. They just hide the point. This is why I
believe reddit2 will use either an AI or the emergent intelligence of
thousands of redditors to distill articles down to a short synopsis.

I do not think reading the whole article is a sign of intelligence. If I want
to read something that's going to take 30-40 minutes it will be a lot more
planned out than just stumbling upon an interesting headline.

I really think the article format has had its day but it will take a while for
people to admit they don't like reading long flowery opinionated journal
entries.

~~~
neetodavid
And we should replace all of our meals with Soylent!

~~~
smartsystems
It's intellectual junk food at best.

