Apollo Guidance Computer restoration videos | Hacker News Reader

Apollo Guidance Computer restoration videos

curiousmarc.com

89 pointsmariuz11 comments

I have been following this series since it began, and it's just magical for the sort of nerds who have consumed all of the surface-level documentaries and books about Apollo, especially if you have an interest in electronics engineering, computer science, or radio communications. It's a genre that's distinct to YouTube--something I fear going away every time YouTube tries to chase TikTok and Instagram trends.

Marc, Ken, and their team are national treasures. I'm absolutely blown away at the depth and breadth of what they have accomplished in this series.

A few books that I whole-heartedly recommend:

- "Digital Apollo", a book about HCI, the tension between automation and human-in-the-loop, the history of systems engineering and minutae of each Apollo landing through those lenses. If you want a heavy dose of interesting, inspiring and thought-provoking HCI and embedded engineering lessons and anecdotes in context of the most thrilling examples possible you'll love this.

- "Sunburst and Luminary", the really quite charming and lively memoir by Apollo software engineer Don Eyles.

- "Apollo" by Cox and Murray, a go-to general history of the Apollo program that emphasizes program management and engineering far more than the astronauts.

This + the CuriousMarc videos and you'll feel spaceflight mini expert high, and be quite capable of maybe flying a landing in one of the emulators, actually understand the technical jargon in any of the Apollo landing videos or the Apollo 13 incident video, or appreciate some AGC source code.

I second these recommendations and want to add Go, Flight for some of the in-flight coordination and engineering perspective.

I'm really interested in the "development process", for lack of a better word, of Apollo. Obviously it was not kanban, sprints and retrospectives, but I am curious about how they actually went about it.

I suggested that after the Final Countdown first computers are made with Rope Memory and Mechanical Relays. But Ken Schirriff said NO -- you need semifast semiconductors to read the memory.

If you have relays, the easiest RAM is just a bank of latching relays and the easiest ROM is a resistor board. Core rope is only for density.

Achually. If you have L.M.Ericsson 8x8 latching crossbar switch, 64-bit memory needs only 6 relays. Yes SIX.

The Fuji relay-computer has lots of those crossbar switches.

However. The rope-memory in this scene is read-only-storage containing vast amount of data. Rope memory is economical to use but labor-intensive to produce.

You'd be able to do it with tubes at least.

I would love to see a relay switch at 1Mhz.

You will amazed. One reason is that relays are suitable for multilevel signalling. That is why the relays-only Fuji computer was on par with contemporary Amerikahito crap.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but the fact that a usb-c to HDMI cable has something like 100x more computing power than the AGC still blows my mind!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com