July 21 is a historically important date for a couple of space events. On July 21, 1961, Gus Grissom became the second person to orbit the Earth during the Mercury 4 mission. While we missed the anniversary of the first steps on the moon by a day (July 20, 1969), we also have the landing of the final flight of the Space Shuttle on July 21, 2011.
Cisco in Space
Well, all of this space history is cool, but what does it have to do with Cisco and developers? Cisco has a pretty solid history with space missions as well. Back in 2009, Cisco partnered with NASA on a platform for monitoring climate change. More recently, in 2022, Cisco announced that it helping out with the Artemis program, which is an unmanned mission to the moon, by helping develop a communications platform that includes Webex.
Astro-Developers
For developers that are interested in the space program, there is a rich history. Before NASA had state-of-the-art computers, they employed 400 "human computers". These brilliant people were mostly women, and some of the best and brightest were also African-American, as shown in the film Hidden Figures. The computations that these engineers developed were eventually converted into FORTRAN.
Do you actually want to check out the code used for the moon landing? The source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) and the command and lunar modules are posted on GitHub. There is even an emulation of the Apollo onboard guidance computer... almost like being there (except for the gravity and atmosphere)!
