A computer engineer has tracked down the first Apollo guidance computer
gadget.co.za
gadget.co.za
OTOH, back in those days, maybe there was more of a sense of pushing things forward, and less nostalgia, and maybe that was a good thing. I can't decide if I like having every speck of computer history catalogued and put in a museum. For one thing, I fear that 50 years from now, people will cling to the stories of the creators of Android or iOS or Pokemon Go, and somehow that old Nokia flip phone I have in my junk box will be a museum piece.
Nostalgia. Can't live with it, can't live without it.
Often researchers and tenured staff held on to such artifacts but eventually retired or died.
Their offices were emptied out by random staff who had no clue of the significance of their possessions and thrown out of left in a collection bin in the hallway.
I've got a few gems I rescued from such situations, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was what happened, even if not, it's worth knowing that this happens :(
Until the era of thumb drives came along...
I'd wager it has more to do with the... significant overlap between rocket guidance and long range missile guidance. Nothing to stir up a good panic like the thought of the latter ending up in North Korea's hands - how much good it'd actually do NK being entirely besides the point.
After Apollo 11, President Nixon presented moon rock samples as gifts to various countries and states. Over 180 of them are now missing, and the FBI investigates people who are allegedly selling them (hint: they're usually fakes)
The whole 6 part documentary series are worth watching for anyone remotely interested in space, but here's a small sample of the quality of the moon landing video footage: https://kristofferR.com/files/moonlanding_footage_HD.mkv
Let's just focus on a space station and travelling to the red planet we know little about. What footprints on the moon?
I've never observed this to be the case, and I collected conspiracy theories for a good few years. The people who credit them tend in my experience to be a rather close-mouthed lot, not least because they're accustomed to ridicule, and probably the very last word I'd choose to describe them would be 'hip'. I'm curious what you've seen that leads you to consider otherwise.
In particular I am happy about the timing. They accept inertial guidance to be a bit off because transferring it closer to T=0 would make it less accurate because of rocket vibrations!
Technically nazis V1 had analog guidance computer and traveled in space. The same with all later ballistic missiles etc.
Early soviet manned space flights (Vostok, Voschod) were fully automated, in case pilot passes out. Americans did not had that until Apollo.
There was even 'password' login :-) [wiki, Vostok 1]
> The entire mission would be controlled by either automatic systems or by ground control. This was because medical staff and spacecraft engineers were unsure how a human might react to weightlessness, and therefore it was decided to lock the pilot's manual controls. In an unusual move, a code to unlock the controls was placed in an onboard envelope, for Gagarin's use in case of emergency.[7]:278 Prior to the flight, Kamanin and others told Gagarin the code anyway.
Even the US Gemini program had an on-board guidance computer before Apollo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
Insert joke about Cosmonauts being little more than trained monkeys with a stick, and Astronauts just being trained monkeys.
Or were you talking about a different kind of "PAS-sword"?
http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4114/why-is-a-stick...
It didn't provide all the capabilities that the AGC did, but it did provide for navigation calculations and rode inside the capsule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-17B
The Soviet R7 ICBM used a guidance system with tubes so that it was larger - that was a major reason why they needed a bigger missile; and that one would eventually take man to space.
The v2 had a gyroscopic a guidance system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj2QVgfyXik
Turns out, the only collectors' items turned out to be equipment I'd junked. The ones I kept are all junk. Who knew my H-11 would become valuable? :-(
I can't even imagine how much one of these modules cost to make at the time they were produced. Tens of thousands surely.
Quite a bit of circuitry from those days was made like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_integrated_circuit
Excellent mechanical properties (esp. with respect to vibration resistance) and more compact than the other mounting methods available at the time, it seems to me to have been the obvious choice for anything on spacecraft or aircraft.
I can remember building computers in the early 1990s with logic boards that looked more primitive than what was in this module from the 1960s.
Apparently surface mounting was developed specifically for the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-mount_technology
Unfortunately, once the tube reached operating temperature, his painstakingly hand drawn traces and glued down components delaminated. However, it shows that people were thinking about that sort of thing.
One has to wonder how it ended up in a scrap auction. I would love to know the provenance of that.
what happens when the magnet becomes deplolarized? isn't the only way to ensure the bits he's got out are correct to actually inspect the copper weaves? for all we know they were tossed in the trash because they were defective
I guess then you try the same thing floppy disk rescueing programs did : keep attempting to read it until you have enough data to make a stastistically significant bet. It should work pretty well since you get an analog value encoding a digital one to start with.