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Restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer

 
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Awesome in-depth look at the design and restoration of an original Apollo Guidance Computer.  









Puts my tinkering with a Raspberry Pi to shame!
 
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What, you're not doing massive wire-wraps and manual point-to-point wiring?

Good times. Space electronics tends to be behind the times, I don't expect ICs (although I do have a flip-flop in a can labelled "Nasa" from about 1970), and PCBs back then were as likely as not to be a brittle phenolic susceptible to cracking when subjected to launch stresses.

Nowadays, you could pack a half-dozen Raspberry Pis and save enough launch weight for an extra bag of Oreos, And each Pi would have more power than the GC and the mainframes backing it up on the ground. You could even play Lunar Lander on them!

What technology has become over the last century scares me. My grandfather was born in the horse-and-buggy age, saw airplanes invented, grew up to be an automobile mechanic, saw jets replace most prop-driven planes, and saw the wide-spread adoption of telephones and mainframe computers. He hadn't been dead a decade when the first personal computers came out, and in two decades, practically everyone either owned or had access to one. Now we carry them in our pockets and have the Internet and I can buy enough computing power to defeat the Kaiser for under $1.

And that's just some of the high spots. I can imagine what he would have thought if he'd seen a 3D printer.
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