wiggy
My bad, thank you for correcting me! I obviously was not paying enough attention when I thought I knew about Apollo.
Thank you also for providing a reference to back up your fact.
Originally Posted by
wiggy
In any event it was Human Beings, not a computer, that saved the descent
Here is another one which would slightly even the balance
"Due to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time. The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ...
If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful [M]oon landing it was.[21][a]
— Letter from Margaret H. Hamilton, Director of Apollo Flight Computer Programming