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[i]But I clearly recall helping them come up with a couple of semi-fatal computer errors, errors that would cause the computers to start restarts. Well, it was one of those or a derivation of one of those, it was just a few months before Apollo 11,[b] I'm quite sure it was May or June [/b]— and I'm sure you know by now exactly when—that a young fellow named Steve [Stephen G.] Bales, a couple years older than I was, was the Guidance Officer, and that was the front-room position that we most often supported because he kind of watched the computers. One of these screwy computers alarms, "computer gone wrong" kind of things, happened, and he called an abort of the lunar landing and should not have, and it scared everybody to death. Those of us in the back room didn't think anything of it. Again, we weren't in touch with the seriousness of simulation to the real world. "Okay, well, do it again." But Gene Kranz, who was the real hero of that whole episode, said, "No, no, no. I want you all to write down every single possible computer alarm that can possibly go wrong." Remember, I'm looking at this as, "Well, we should have thought up a better failure," and he's looking at it like, "This stuff can really happen," partially because he didn't understand the computers, but partially because he's absolutely right. He's looking at the forest and not the trees. So he made us go off and study every single computer alarm that existed in the code, ones that could not possibly happen, they were put in there just for testing purposes, right down to ones that were normal, and to figure out, even if we couldn't come up with a reason for why the alarm would happen, what were the manifestations if it did. Is it over? Is the computer dead? What would you do if it did happen, even if you don't know? So we did. We did. I still have a copy of it. It's handwritten, under a piece of plastic, and we wrote it down for every single computer run and stuck it under the glass on the console. And sure enough, Murphy's law, the onboard computers ran in two-second cycles, which is horribly long in today's computer world.[/i]
[i]"About[b] a month before the flight they did one last one[/b]... They asked me to provide something that was a sort of software glitch. So I did and believe it or not it was one of those alarms." [/i] At 3.41 he comments - [i]"I want to tell you it was gruesome afterwards..."[/i]
"[i]So what we had checked out with the simulation, and we'd done a lot of work after that [b]sim kind of blew up on us in the second week of June[/b], we had MIT run a whole lot of other checks to see if we had to fix the software on the spacecraft or do something differently. Well, by that time it was too late to really make any changes that anybody was going to be confident you'd get in and get right without screwing something else up. So we flew with it that way.[/i]
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