In the 8 minutes before the first moon landing the flight control computer crashed *4 times.* It was trying to run extra programs because of a misconfiguration by the astronauts and it was running out of memory (all 3 kB). In such instances it was designed to reinitialize, essentially rebooting the system, and restart all critical programs *right where they left off.* This would freeing the memory taken up by non-critical programs. Because of the extensive testing this was known to be completely safe for the mission to continue.

Can you imagine any of our modern electronics being this bullet proof?

BTW, you can watch and listen to the whole landing sequence over here http://ift.tt/R1ux9M
Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal: Program Alarms

I thought you might be interested in some more detail about the 1201 and 1202 program alarms that occurred durning the Apollo 11 lunar landing. I and my good friend Don Eyles were two of the ‘young experts’ at the MIT Instrumentation Lab – Draper Lab – who worked on the software for the LEM guidance…

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