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Build Your Own Apollo Guidance Computer
PingXao writes "Well, if you can't exactly give the Moon you can give the gift of a computer to get you there. Almost a year ago this Slashdot story about the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer referenced a pretty cool Dr. Dobbs Journal article from their History of Computing series. Now there's this guy who built one in his basement! It took him 4 years, $2,980 in cash, 2,500 hours of labor and 15,000 hand-wrapped wire connections with 3,500 feet of wire to build. It might be next Christmas before you could build one of your own to give as a gift, but he promises you can build your own for less and it will be better than his. The perfect gift for the space geek who has everything. This guy is my hero."
Now all he has to do is build his own apollo 11, and he's all set to go to the moon! He just has to pay a few hundred million to get the rockets to take it up.
[me] HI AUNT EDNA! Look what I built for you! Its an exact replica of the Apollo guidance computer!
[Aunt Edna] uh, thanks?
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
You could just hack a Gameboy Advance, and have even more horsepower! To the MOOOOOOOOOOOOON!!!!!!!!
will it run Linux? ... or at least NetBSD?
Easy, they weren't bogged down with a GUI.
you see, I come from a time in the nineteen hundred and seventies
when computers where used for two things
too either go to the moon or play pong
and nothing inbetween, you see
and You didn't need a fancy operating system to play pong
and the men who went to the moon, god bless them
did it with no mouse
and a plain text only black and white screen
and thiry-two kilobytes of ram
Beyond that, this guy is lucky its christmas because with multiple 4-9 meg pdf files it would be a silent night for his server.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
10$ says it's flashing "1202" right about now...
And what's the point? He spent 4 years building that and I can spend an hour building something for $3000 that will be a million times more powerful AND let me play Half-Life 2. Pffft.
With that kinda money you could rebuild the sound stage they faked the first trip to the moon on!
-bbh
Now he has his own server slashdotted just before [Insert Religous Denomination Holiday Here]. Yup, he sure is the space geek who has EVERYTHING now!
Take that those doing with less!
To be really authentic, he should have made up his own core
memory. Using semiconductor ram is an easy out,
Can it simulate the part where the sensor loop queue was overloaded because they forgot to turn off the rendevous radar and the warning lights went crazy and Neil or Buzz wet his suit? (I have no official info that they did, but I bet at least one did but never told anyone.)
Table-ized A.I.
A perfect way to add guidance to my Cruise Missile
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
with those old boxes, how in hell did they ever make it to the moon and back alive.
It takes more computational power to provide a retarded paperclip assistant than it does to go to the Moon.
Where on earth are you going to find the vintage IC's for this thing? (Didn't RTFA).
Well, RTFA you lazy sod! Had you done so, you'd have had your answer quicker than it took you to post the question.
Hmm, they could not use a GUI, since it requires a mouse and everyone knows that the moon is made of cheese, so taking a mouse to the moon would have been a total disaster...
Oh well, what the hell...
This begs the question of how we make voluntary sterilization an attractive option.
+++ATH0
Go read the articles and you'll appreciate what a tremendous amount of work this was -- a hell of an achievement of the variety that makes most PhD applications look like a 3rd grade book report.
Unfortunately, it's an achievement akin to digging a large hole in the ground with a spoon. Someone wasted a lot of their time to do something useless in the most inefficient way possible.
. . .
g 1007_hall_s.ppt
:
0 7.pdf pages 4-5.
This is a link to a a partial tear-down of a Apollo Guidance Computer Logic Unit.
http://klabs.org/mapld04/presentations/session_g/
on slide three, N.B. the cost : $275,800.00.
now i wonder could the guy in the story have afforded to deal with this as well
"In the early orbital missions before Apollo, NASA learned that the human animal, confined in a spacecraft for a week or so, was not as clean as might be expected from observations on Earth. This additional constraint had . . far-reaching impact . . All electrical connections and other surfaces had to be corrosive resistant . . . everything had to be hermetically sealed."
eww!
quote from http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/17
"Early gun-type designs are interesting. Because they're so simple, you can (if you like) actually understand the entire critical assembly process, from the start of fission to the propagation of the produced shockwave"
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it