Skip to main content

Build your own Apollo 11 Landing Computer

The Apollo missions represent the pinnacle of human achievement, the acme of human exploration. And the computer that took humans to the moon was a marvel in itself. Developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, it was quite an amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s. It was the first computer to use integrated circuits (ICs), running at 1 MHz it offered four 16-bit registers, 4K words of RAM and 32K words of ROM. Heck, your cell phone has more processing power than that!

AGC-1

Would like to own your very own Apollo Landing computer? Well, that's possible, because a geek named John Pultorak created a working reproduction of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and wrote a complete manual that will allow you to build your own Apollo flight computer clone. You can find this fantastic 1,000 page documentation which includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer, posted at Galaxiki.

agc-scheme

John Pultorak, a 54 year old Lockheed Martin software engineer, built his own Apollo AGC in his basement. It took him 4 years to build it (working about 10 hours a week on the project) and cost him $3, 000 for the required hardware. The manual he prepared also includes the required software code for the computer.

The original Apollo AGC cost NASA $150,000. It didn’t have a hard disk, just 32K words of hard wired ROM. The AGC multitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced "disky"); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

The hardware looks primitive by today’s standard, but it accomplished a feat that hasn’t been repeated since. The AGC controlled a 13,000 kg spaceship, orbiting at 3,500 kilometers per hour around the moon, landed it safely within meters of a specified location and guided it back from the surface to rendezvous with a command ship in lunar orbit. The system also kept fuel consumption to a minimum because the spacecraft only contained enough fuel for one landing attempt.

Leaves you breathless, doesn’t it?

[via Universe Today]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: