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Forty Years and Looking Forward

Apollo 11 mission was remarkable in more ways than one

Although Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. are the public faces of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, they weren’t the only heroes involved in this historic endeavor.

Working behind the scenes in quiet anonymity, a large cadre of engineers was tasked with ensuring the flight, moon landing and return to earth were successful. Without their hard work and dedication, Armstrong might never have uttered that now infamous statement, “That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

“I think there was a national purpose behind the moon landing—a shared sense of unity,” remarks Ed Poole, who, having just graduated from college with a mathematics degree, began his behind-the-scenes Apollo 11 work in 1965 as an IBM programmer. “I was surrounded by people who were very committed to performing their parts to make sure everything went as well as it did. Nobody was looking at the clock and packing it in at five o’clock.”

These dedicated people included between 1,500 to 2,000 IBM engineers, estimates Poole, who were writing software and installing the necessary hardware. In the case of Apollo 11, this hardware included five IBM System/360 Model 75s, one acting as the primary control box, a second as an active backup for that, a third as an inactive backup for the second should it have to take on the duties of the first—and so on.

“We had five of those because we absolutely had to have redundancy. If one 360 were to fail, it would failover to the other, active one. The next inactive one would then become the active backup—and down the line. Because of the critical nature of what we were doing, we couldn’t take any chances—we couldn’t power down a system and then power it back up. Once we were running, we had to continue to run,” Poole says.

Notions such as that, keeping systems in lock step, might have been relatively novel then, but they’ve become commonplace since—thanks in large part to what was learned not only during the Apollo 11 mission, but also previous and subsequent space missions. Now, real-time mirroring is old hat, with businesses adopting it as simply another part of any IT deployment.

“You learn a great deal when you do things like we did,” notes Poole, who retired from IBM in 2005 but continues to consult for IBM in the outer-space market. “We weren’t really clustering, but clustering certainly came out of that—and now we have clustered supercomputers that do things we might never have imagined.”

Poole is of course proud of his place in Apollo 11 lore, but he insists on looking forward, realizing that what’s done is done and that the future is now. “There are new frontiers out there, and I think we need to move in that direction,” he says. “We’ve been to the moon, and Mars should be the next manned-mission target. That’s where we need to go next.”

He is also hopeful people build upon lessons learned and use technology to achieve the best, most secure earth they can: one where other young engineers are tackling issues similar to those he and the 1,000-plus other Apollo 11 engineers had faced. But now, instead of slide rules and early calculators, they’ll be using evolutionary supercomputers to realize true non-business, mission-critical goals.

See photos from the 1969 mission.