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| Diane's 1958-1964 album |
| 1960-05-01 Milt Trageser, Hal Laning & Dick Battin |
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Milt was the guidance guy, especially accelerometers. He and Pete Sr were good friends. . Hal was the computer guy; he invented the compiler. IBM came and picked his brain, went away, and developed FORTRAN. While they were doing that, Hal did the MAC language, matrix math operations built in. MAC had multi-line input for subscripts and was a competitive advantage of the Laboratory for years. (However, MAC only ran on an IBM mainframe and was never updated for massive storage - its byte [0-255] element descriptors eventually doomed it - a loss to engineering.) Hal was Pete Jr's boss's boss for several years. . Dick Battin was the NASA guy. He led the design of the Apollo guidance computer in the 1960s - a major part of the Laboratory's role in putting men on the moon. After his retirement from Draper Lab in 1987, he continued as a senior lecturer in the Aero & Astro Dept at MIT until 2010. "Battin was noted for his teaching abilities, especially for his work in teaching, mentoring and inspiring many of the leaders in the world's guidance, navigation and control community. Three of the Apollo astronauts were his graduate students. To honor his teaching abilities, the students of MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics Department honored Battin with their first Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1981. ... His lecture, 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon', is available through the MIT Open Courseware program." -- Wikipedia |