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[i]So if you knew the computer programs and you had sort of memorized all these flag bits, you could stare at these octal numbers, and a single octal digit is a combination of three binary bits, so you have to do the conversion in your head. You can stare at these octal numbers, and they're absolutely meaningless. I mean, the label on the screen would be flag word one, flag word two, and we'd stare at these columns of numbers and say, "Yeah, the computer's doing this, the computer's doing that." Well, it was one of those or a derivation of one of those, it was just a few months before Apollo 11, I'm quite sure it was May or June—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."[/i]
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