Was the hope that the code would be temporary, or that the external conditions the code was dealing with would be temporary? Remember this is flight control software. There might be transient conditions that the system can handle fine, but could lead to failure if they persist.
That call to STOPRATE was there to zero out attitude rate commands at the moment the astronaut switches into the semimanual final descent program P66. It was removed in the final few revisions before the first, unflown release of the Apollo 14 software (Luminary 163 [1]) because it was preventing attitude control of the spacecraft when Rate-Of-Descent commands were skipped [2]. Skipping ROD commands wasn't normal, but was something that was added as part of the effort to make the computer more cleanly handle large unexpected additional load, like happened in Apollo 11.
People frequently seem to think this is about the line number it's on (666), but that doesn't have anything to do with it. That line number is a totally modern construction; the original source code was on punch cards. That particular comment was punched onto card number 0562 in the LUNAR LANDING GUIDANCE EQUATIONS log section. The original developers only referred to code by punch card number, and page number in the listing. So it really is just a coincidence, and the "NUMERO MYSTERIOSO" is referring to whatever is in GAINBRAK,1.
No, it's not. The 1 here is using interpretive index register X1 to index onto GAINBRAK. The star on the DMP means that multiplication is indexed. GAINBRAK is one of the pad-loaded descent targeting parameters; the index selects the appropriate number based on the phase of the descent.
> At the get-together of the AGC developers celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first moonwalk, Don Eyles (one of the authors of this routine along with Peter Adler) has related to us a little interesting history behind the naming of the routine.
Wherever we added modern comments, they are denoted by a double hashtag (##) at the beginning of the line. Everything else, minus formatting concerns, is directly from the original listing. You can see the scans we transcribed this from here:
It makes sense in context, of course, I just didn't think of NASA in the late 60ies as the sort of place where you could write 'clever' things like that.
Back when AS/400s were AS/400s, I made a little tool to help the operators run a long process at night. I felt playful and left an easter egg: on Fridays the 13th, it would work as usual, but display a skull and bones with blinking red eyes while doing it.
It seems that Fridays the 13th are rarer than I estimated, because months later my boss woke me up at midnight because the operators had woken her up because it was the first time the egg was triggered. In hindsight, it was a foolish thing to add since this was a bank. Fortunately they took it with good humor, and even kept the easter egg to scare new people.
I suppose NASA is more formal than a bank, so they only let you fool around with the comments.
These files were originally put on GitHub in the VirtualAGC repository [1] in 2015. The code was publicly released and digitized into these source files in 2009, through cooperation with the MIT Museum.
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
...it was not temporary