Apollo 11 – Code 1201!
I was watching a replay of the Apollo 11 landing, and maybe 30 seconds before the touchdown, they call out an Alarm code 1201 and 1202. Being the kind of inquisitive geek I am, and loving the internet, I went to search for what that meant – and low and behold, there is a page online from the programmer from MIT who worked on the software for the Lunar Module, explaining in geeky terms how the software worked and what the 1201 and 1202 errors meant.
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html
The summary is that because a setting was wrong, the landing computer was trying to track docking radar with rejoining with the orbiter command module, and the computer realized it was being asked to do more than it could do at the same time, and did the equivalent of the old Windows Alt-Ctrl-Del 3 finger salute – rebooting itself, and focusing on its higher priority tasks – landing on the moon. Fortunately for the Apollo 11 crew, the computer was not running Windows, so the reboot didn’t take 3 minutes :)
