This year marks the 50th anniversary of three important events in computing. The first of these is the July 1969 landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, the first time human beings landed and walked on another celestial body. This would not have been possible without a large number of computer design and software development techniques that were created for it. Second, 1969 was the year that the ARPAnet first went into operation. Yes, the Internet is basically 50 years old. The third major computing event in 1969 was the beginning of the development of the UNIX operating system. The operating system you’ve been using on tux has its roots in software that Ken Thompson wrote at Bell Labs in 1969.
Your first project assignment is to write a technical paper about some aspect of one of these three events/systems. You are writing for a technical audience, so the paper should not read like a newspaper article or a popular magazine article. It should read like an industry technical report or a scientific conference or journal paper. Not only can you choose which of the three interests you the most, but there are dozens of topics within each that you can choose from. The exact topic and focus of your paper is up to you, but the paper must contain substantial technical content. Some of the possible angles you might take include:
- Explain how the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was designed and how it worked. There are some quite interesting aspects of the design that connect to our study of Boolean Algebra. The types of memory used on the machine were quite interesting. There’s a lot that can be learned digging into the detail at that level.
- Explain how the ARPAnet Interface Message Processors (IMPs) worked.
- What technical limitations were present in the PDP-7 that Thompson first started writing UNIX on?
- Explain the software written for the AGC. There are quite a few interesting techniques that were used to squeeze the functionality needed to fly to the moon into the limited amount of memory. How did they do that? How did the operating system work? How did they handle all the mathematics of flight?
- Discuss the design of the software that ran on the IMPs.
- How did Thompson’s original experiments on the PDP-7 evolve into an operating system.
- Discuss one of the individuals involved in the design and programming of the AGC. Keep in mind that your audience won’t find something purely biographical to be interesting. You need to get into what that person’s technical contriburions were. What drove them? Why were the interested in working on this project? You should include enough technical background on what they did to make their contribution clear and enough detail on what they did to satisfy the curiosity of a technical reader.
- Focus on one of the dramatic events that occurred during a flight. There were repeated alarms during the descent to the moon on Apollo 11. What’s the story behind those? What was happening in the hardware and software that led to those alarms? What did they do about them? There was what amounted to an in-flight bug fix on Apollo 14. What’s the story behind that? Who figured out the hack and how to deploy it?
- What led to the migration from the original ARPAnet protocols to the TCP/IP protocols we use today?
- What was involved in the migration of UNIX from the PDP-7 to the PDP-11 and then to other hardware platforms?
Sample Solution
