Many of you have probably heard the repeated story of the first Moon landing in 1969 almost getting undone by a bunch of onboard computer glitches:

There could not be a worse time in the flight to have computer problems. At, the time the press gleefully reported how Armstrong seized manual control from a crippled and failing onboard computer and managed to heroically and single-handedly land the spaceship on the surface of the Moon against all odds.

Robert Wills argues against this narrative in this 2020 talk, wanting to shine a spotlight away from Neil Armstrong and toward people who designed the software (among them Margaret Hamilton), and the mission control’s Steve Bales, who made a decision not to abort the launch as the 1201 and 1202 errors were piling up.

The argument: the computer was working as intended, it fixed itself over and over again owing to its clever software, and it actually helped Buzz Aldrin understand (at least subconsciously) what led to the seemingly random and distracting computer errors.

The above is more of a traditional talk than the videos I usually share – a bit more technical, taking up an entire hour, and with generic slides – but it’s buoyed by Wills’s enthusiasm and knowledge.

Besides, it’s lunar landing! Did you know about DSKY and its fascinating keyboard and UI? Did you know the spacecraft’s window was part of the interface, too? Or that its software was woven into the hardware? Or that the Apollo 11 had a… guillotine in it?

Unaddressed in the talk, but also important:

An unsung hero of the decision not to abort the landing is Richard Koos, a NASA simulation supervisor who […] 11 days before the launch of Apollo 11, put the team of controllers including Bales […] through a simulation that intentionally triggered a 1201 alarm. […] Unable to figure out what the 1201 was, Bales aborted that simulated landing. He and Flight Director Gene Kranz were dressed down for it by Koos, who put the team through four more hours of training the next day specifically on program alarms. When the 1202 and 1201 alarms occurred during the actual landing, Garman, Bales, and even Duke recognized them immediately.

Fortune favors the prepared.

I feel macOS these days starts feeling like Windows in the 1990s where occasionally some core component of it breaks, and a reboot is necessary to restore it to full functionality again.

But even with that in mind: this happened literally right after the reboot, with nothing much happening and no other signs of the system in distress.

It’s hard for me to even understand what would make this kind of thing pop up. Trash feels like one of the core tenets of a GUI – like undo, or copy/​paste, or windows gaining focus. You don’t expect it to just… stop working, especially with a circular error message like the above.

I still sometimes think of the miracle that is Undo Send in Gmail.

Michael Leggett announcing it in 2009:

This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.

There’s so much cleverness hiding in here: recognizing that this particular flavour of l’esprit de l’escalier exists, shifting time from the past to the near future, the repurposing of the undo branding, the fallback if things go wrong.

There was, I imagine, even the challenge of having to forget about the previous version of this feature elsewhere, which were the awful emails with RECALL: in the title, which I think maybe only worked in Outlookk, if at all? (Everyone else suffered like green bubble people do today.) I don’t know. Sometimes the biggest hurdle to a great idea is blocking bad execution you already know from your head. On the other hand, sometimes someone else’s bad execution can be motivating.

I even think that not using ⌘Z for this was a clever idea. ⌘Z without text editing context/​focus can be really tricky. Do you remember when Safari had ⌘Z to bring back last closed tab before they came to their senses and used ⌘⇧T like Chrome?

It is sometimes harrowing when you want to click it Undo Send and just miss it – keyboard is more precise here – but not sure ⌘Z would register here. Even Esc would be tricky.

I miss when Gmail was in the “young and open to trying new things” phase.

Ash K on Mastodon: