I'm a little surprised by their approach. I mean, it did work, it is cool, and it is the most important thing. Still I can't stop thinking that I wouldn't sleep before I wrote an assembler and a disassembler. Judging by the presentation they had no assembler and disassembler for several months and just lived with that.<p>asm/disasm can help to find typos in listings, they can help to find xrefs or even to do some static analysis to check for mistake classes they knew they could make. It wouldn't replace any of the manual work they've done, but still it can add some confidence on top of it. Maybe they wouldn't end with priors 50/50 for the success, but with something like 90/10.<p>Strange. Do I underestimate the complexity of writing an asm and disasm pair?
I think what fascinates me the most about all of this is how there are wide gaps in how much design and engineering documentation from that time period has survived to present day. For a long time, I just assumed that NASA owned and archived every design spec, revision, research paper, memo and napkin doodle related to their public-facing missions. I learned recently that even a lot of the original Gemini and Apollo program code (let alone source code) and docs are apparently gone forever.
henry s f cooper's book _the evening star_ is a great description of the Magellan probe (the venus orbiter), and how they were debugging what turned out to be OS race conditions on a spacecraft millions of miles away