A couple of links to the videos you mentioned:
http://www.sciencechannel.com/video-topics/space-videos/moon...
The above is probably one of the most informative 2 minute videos I've ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWcITjqZtpU&list=PL7E6922816...
"there were no specs, we made it up" "if you screwed up you got a stack of papers that was 2 feet thick" "the overall memory for the Apollo guidance computer was 72 kilobytes"
Just another kind of "the space program was amazing" thing - the sheer diversity of people who got hired on to contribute is continually surprising. An amazing tribute to the pragmatism of NASA under the conditions.
The problem was actually a deployment problem. The checklist for configuring the computer left a diagnostic mode on that sucked up a lot of CPU.
The AGC was one of the first to use priority multitasking. The 1201 and 1201 faults were indication that lower priority tasks were getting yanked.
See "Moon Machines". Seriously.