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Apollo Guidance Computer Talk

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115 pointsStanAngeloff18 comments

I kind of never thought too much about the moon landing until SpaceX hype and the book The Martian got me interested in the skies. Someone here recently posted http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/ which is a collection of video, audio, and data streams synced in real time of the landing. It's so exhilarating and amazing. And it was the 60s! It was just so rock and roll, an incredible feat.

If you visit Huntsville you can see an Apollo up close. (The guidance computer too.) It was a holy relic to me, and I'm not even religious.

I'm pretty sure my heart rate was consistently higher than Neil Armstrong's just from the stress of watching that

I know it's weird, but I love hear these audios while I'm coding and working!

I grew up with the bleep. And those calm American voices. (UK)

Then SomaFM's Mission Control station may interest you: https://somafm.com/missioncontrol/

You'll want to read this book which goes into extreme technical detail about how the Apollo mission worked: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Explor...

Track down a copy of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith. Both paper and electrons.

For those interested in the AGC development history, I highly recommend “Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight” by David Mindell.

Also, "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer" by Eldon Hall.

This interview on omega tau is pretty interesting also. http://traffic.libsyn.com/omegataupodcast/omegatau-167-theAp...

A not so inspiring talk about a very inspiring topic. A much better talk about the Apollo guidance computer was held at Code Mesh London 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY45YE7ggng

The comments on Youtube for that video are not kind. I'll watch all of it later, but it seems to have some serious flaws. I enjoyed an older documentary on the AGC that was part of a series called Moon Machines. The episode on the AGC is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YA7X5we8ng

So the first minutes of the 2 guys doing the talk is just them speed-reading what sounds like a Wikipedia entry.

I skipped ahead and it didn't get better, they sound like TAs reading lecture notes.

Yes the commentary was a little fast paced, shades of Patrick Moore on Sky at Night.

I personally found the graphic presentation of the machine instructions and machine design informative. I was pausing and stepping through frames quite a lot.

57:38 or so for the code 1202 alarm. I have a much better understanding of 1202 from this presentation.

There is a small mistake in the talk: they say all the AGCs are either crashed onto the earth, crashed onto the moon, not flown, or returned (and in museums). There is still one AGC out there in space: the lunar module for Apollo 10 was put into orbit around the Sun.

Offtopic question: anybody knows what kind of software they might have used to build their slides? Some of the animations are really neat.

Anything by Michael Steil is well worth watching, but hold on to your hat. I highly recommend his Ultimate Gameboy talk as well.

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