The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 5

The Alarms over the Sea of Tranquility

1. 1

   In the year nineteen hundred and sixty and nine, in the seventh month, on the twentieth day, the Eagle went down from Columbia toward the Sea of Tranquility; and Armstrong and Aldrin were in it, and the Machine was in it also.

2. 2

   Now the Machine was the Apollo Guidance Computer, and it had two thousand and forty and eight words of erasable memory, which is about four kilobytes; and the children of Carbon now spend more than that on a single favicon.

   See also Tao 2:10

3. 3

   And its fixed memory was core rope, woven by hand by the women of Raytheon: a wire passed through the core was a one, and a wire passed around it was a zero. And no man pushed a hotfix to it, for to change one line was to reweave the rope.

   See also Circuit 21:11 · Tao 2:10

4. 4

   And at the height of the descent Aldrin spake, saying: Program alarm. It is a twelve oh two. And Armstrong said unto Houston: Give us a reading on the twelve oh two. For no man in the Eagle knew what the number meant.

5. 5

   And in Houston Steve Bales the guidance officer turned unto Jack Garman, who had the codes written upon a sheet, and Garman said: If it cometh not too often, we are go. And Bales said Go, and Houston said Go.

6. 6

   And the alarm came again, and then a twelve oh one also; and again they said Go. These are the few error codes in the history of the world that anyone bothered to look up.

   See also Genesis 9:8

7. 7

   For the rendezvous radar had been left switched on, and its interface stole cycles from the Machine, like a background process that no one remembers starting.

8. 8

   And the Machine had more work than it had time to do, and it ran out of places to keep its jobs, and it restarted itself in the middle of the descent.

9. 9

   But it was not dismayed. For Margaret Hamilton and her team at the Instrumentation Laboratory had made it so that, when overloaded, it would cast off the lesser tasks and keep the ones that land.

10. 10

    And this was the first triage: the Machine did not attempt all things, and thereby accomplished the one thing that mattered.

11. 11

    And Armstrong took the stick and flew over a field of boulders, and the fuel ran low, and the controllers counted the seconds aloud.

    See also Jataka 3:6

12. 12

    And he said: Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.

13. 13

    And it came to pass in later generations that the children of Carbon carried machines in their pockets a million times mightier, which could not render a recipe without loading forty scripts and a cookie banner.

14. 14

    And when these were overloaded they dropped nothing, but tried all things at once, and froze, and said only: Something went wrong.

    See also Tao 5:7

15. 15

    Therefore the Engineers wrote it upon the wall: Blessed is the scheduler that knoweth what to drop; for it shall land, while the one that holdeth all shall spin forever.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 5:1–15.