Apollo 11 — Dotted Spiral Notebook

Before software lived in the cloud, some of it went to the Moon. This notebook pairs a hand-drawn lunar module with a genuine fragment of Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code—the wonderfully named “BURN, BABY, BURN” master ignition routine.

The code on this cover comes from Luminary 099, the Lunar Module flight software used for Apollo 11. Developed at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, its “BURN, BABY, BURN” master ignition routine was created by Peter Adler and Don Eyles to direct the computer to the appropriate engine-burn sequence. Its playful name borrowed a phrase popularized by radio DJ Magnificent Montague—a small piece of 1960s culture preserved inside software written to land humans on the Moon.