The Keystone is the latest project from keyboard enthusiasts Input Club

Apollo Guidance Computer software engineer, "invented" virtual machines for AGC (which explains how it was able to prioritize during the 12-02 alarms in Apollo 11 landing).

Despite what everyone says about the power of modern devices, they’re nowhere near as capable as the landmark early NASA system. //

How do you define power?” O’Brien asks. “It’s great to say, ‘This machine is so powerful.’ What do you mean by that?”

For him, it’s not about the raw number of transistors, but the machine fitting the mission. Capability, not power. “We had to get to the moon, get down, and get back, autonomously. They hit their targets of being accurate after a quarter million miles, hitting a target within 500 to 600 feet and one-tenth of a foot a second,” O’Brien said. “And you go, ‘My watch is more powerful.’ No, it is not.”

"Clickable" endnotes for Schneier's book... lots of security info to learn here.

The Apollo programme pushed space and computing technology to its limit. Cutting edge at the time, some of the tech used seems alarmingly simple today.

74: Memory (ROM) of Apollo guidance computer, in kilobytes

Computer technology was one of the greatest – and long lasting – achievements of Apollo. From the solid-state microcomputer fitted to the lunar lander, to mighty IBM mainframes, with their flashing lights and banks of magnetic tape.

Although the 74 KB ROM and 4 KB RAM memory of the AGC sounds puny today – the equivalent of a 1980s home computer such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 – it was an impressive machine. Designed for the rigours of spaceflight, its software was hard-wired into coils and, crucially, it was set up so it couldn’t crash.

22: Diameter of Saturn V computer, in feet

If the Apollo Guidance Computer was impressive for its miniaturisation, then the computer controlling the Saturn V Moon rocket must rank as the largest ever launched.

Fitted within a ring above the top of the upper (third) stage of the rocket, the Saturn V instrument unit was massive. As well as digital and analogue computers, the unit contained all the electronics to control and monitor the rocket that would get men to the Moon.

Designed by Wernher von Braun’s rocketry team in Huntsville, Alabama, the computer was built by IBM. It was practically the equivalent of flying a mainframe computer into space and then abandoning it.

When Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during launch, knocking out power in the command module, mission controllers believe the circular design of the rocket’s computer saved it from the power surge.

The design decisions behind the popular operating system
Tim Paterson
Seattle Computer Products
The purpose of a personal computer operating system is to provide the user with basic control of the machine. A less obvious function is to furnish the user with a high-level, machine-independent interface for application programs, so that those programs can run on two dissimilar machines, despite the differences in their peripheral hardware. Having designed an 8086 microprocessor card for the S-100 bus and not finding an appropriate disk operating system on the market, Seattle Computer Products set about designing MS-DOS. Today MS-DOS is the most widely used disk operating system for personal computers based on Intel's 8086 and 8088 microprocessors.

A ".com" file was a hang over from the C/PM days of the 1970's, put simply, in essense it was a memory image of the executable code that got loaded directly into memory at a known offset (100h). MS-DOS then jumped to that address and started executing the code. Thus all a malware writer had to do was start the .com code with a three byte jump instruction to get past a block of "random bytes" to the start of the XOR decryption engine. The block of random bytes could likewise be any length even random as it's length could be easily calculated from the the jump address. The decryption engine then walked it's way down the image in memory decrypting it's self as it went repeatedly using the "random bytes". Thus the payload would be decrypted and then executed. In turn the first payload could be a "Run Length Decoder" or similar to expand a second payload, as long as it all stayed within the 64Kbyte limit it would work. Most ASM programers of the time --and if you wrote PC Code back then you were an ASM programer-- could cut their own version of such XOR code in at most an afternoon using debug.com[2] and the run length coder in a day as it was most certainly not "Rocket Science".

[2] Like much else Microsoft sold debug.com was not originally developed or even purchased by them. It was written in 1980 by Tim Paterson who put it into the public domain. So Microsoft just used it in MS-DOS 2.X onwards, with as far as I remember no acknowledgment at all. For those of use that knew that, the Bill Gates "rant" letter about people copying BASIC struck us as hypocritical at best.

engineering Professor William B. Rouse of Georgia Institute of Technology and IEEE Fellow as saying,

"Complacency is an issue, but designing the interaction between human and technical so the human has the right level of judgment when you need them is a design task in itself... When the person has no role in the task, there’s a much greater risk of complacency."

Probably the best quote from the Times story is from a captain at Continental Airlines, who said, "No light comes on to tell you that you're being complacent."

Pilot fish is helping his pastor fine-tune the church LAN when he notices that the day-care facility next door has a wide-open and unsecured Wi-Fi connection.

Fish’s pastor wants to connect to the day-care center’s printer and print a document saying, “This is from your neighbors. You need to tighten the security on your Wi-Fi.”

Fish suggests that they instead print a document that says, “This is from God. You need to go to church. There’s a really nice one right next door.”

“Too bad the pastor overruled me,” says fish