Don Eyles was 23 years old when he joined the Apollo project. In this memoir he relates that adventure.

An essential part of my story is the joy of working in the rigorous but responsive medium of computer code — and seeing it fly in space — so I am obliged to touch on the intricacies of the act itself, even to the extent of exhibiting a few lines of code.

The evoked joy seems to have stuck all his life because he adds in the epilogue:

Phyllis, like me but surely few others, wrote flight code for Apollo, and also code that is running, as I write this in 2017, aboard the International Space Station in Earth orbit.

That has been a fun read, the dealing with the technology of more than 60 years ago, the methods and workflows of the past. So agile that it would make quite a few teams of today envious I believe.

Don Eyles kind of mourns that agility towards the end of the book when relating how he experienced the darker days of Nasa and looks back to what they were able to achieve in the sixties:

“When do you want me to launch, next April?” epitomized for me an arrogantly ignorant management culture that I was sorry to see in such stark display at NASA… Despite our advances in tiny computers and video games and interconnection, I fear that we no longer have the ability to do what we did in the 1960s.

Although it’s called “An Apollo Memoir”, I came to skim through some sections, even an entire chapter for that matter, as the author rambles about his love affairs or other stuff completly unrelated to the Apollo Project. It’s ok for me to read about his music tastes and the culture of that time, but a no-go to go through his private conquests. That felt somewhat inapropriate.