Moonmachines...do you remeber when 72 kbytes was a lot of memory

Calling all the gray haired techs. These past two nights i have been staying up to watch a series on the development of the appollo series spacecraft from the time of Kennedys announcement of the US going to the moon.

Not sure if any of you guys get this channel or have seen or see the series in the US. Here is a link.

http://tvschedule.knowledgenetwork....sp?seriesID=16285401&seriesTitle=moonmachines

Well I had some real flashbacks and memories when they talked about the first computer that they had to squeeze into the command module and showed the pioneering of a whole new field of technology.

They mentioned that the first computer used to control the lunar landing had 72Kbyte of memory. I thought back to the day when i graduated and started work in a lab back in SA developing a 32Kbyte memory card for a refrigerated storage holding shed control system to be used at the docks to store and care for fruit before being shipped. Do you think there are many people around that know what a kilobyte even means when everyone talks in gigs and dont even know what it stands for. My oldest son said yeah dad thats 2 and half songs on my mp3

Boy this thing had 64 chips on it and was so big it had to fit into a 19"rack size card. That was back in 1980.

They mentioned MIT doing the development and the guys creating the word software for the first time. The guy that had the chief of software title said he told his wife the news and his wife said not to tell anyone about his new title.

If you can get to see the series it is fantastic. Its the stuff dreams are made of. Except the great thing is its all real and no holywood nonsense.

I said to my boys and my wife, the most fantastic thing is they were trully making things up as they went along. Yeah we get a lot of new tech nowadays and much of it is taken for granted, but the stuff i really admire is the work that is created from no prior art. Just simply building on making an item bigger or faster or more memory is great but not the kind of achievement that the guys involved in the build of this whole industry achieved.

Now we have windows so bloated with useless code I often wonder how some of the so called "programmers" would have faired with a 8085 processor and assembler programming language. Guess its just a sign of my going grey.

Hats off to the leaders of those days who inspired, hired and motivated people to engage in such a historic venture. It must have been such a roller coaster ride testing and developing those craft.

Boys n Girls -

You've got more computer power in your cellphone than Neil used to land his rickety spaceship on the moon with no gas left.

You've got more computer power in your laptop than Mission Control in Houston had in their entire complex, running the whole mission.

-Kevin in Indy

One of the things that stands out in my memories of the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC was how cobbled together the Mercury and Gemini capsules looked. Lots of duct tape and Velcro. It must have taken some serious guts to ride on the tip of a rocket in one of those little cans.

Vaughn thats exacytly what i thought when i saw the same capsule. Boy they had guts or lots of testosterone.
The interesting thing in this series was the techs involved all naturally very bright people openly admit that they made it up as they went along. To some extent you could equate them to the prop builders for Star Trek except their props actually had to work.

My first recollection of the word "computer" was when I was in the Air Force at Larson AFB in Washington state in 1959. There was a gigantic, heavily guarded, building there that we were told contained the 'computer' that largely guided the fighter planes from that installation. It didn't take long for the computing power from that five story building to be dwarfed by hand held, transistorized, consumer products.

The IBM 4341 I cut my teeth on had (IIRC) 640k of RAM and ran over half of the Savings and Loan's in California. Exitement was in the air when IBM released their One Meg chip that was about the size of your thumbnail and in the same year they offered a DASD (Disk) the size of a Fridgidaire that had 2.25 Gig of storage!!! WOW!! LOML's daughter has a 32MB iPod .

my first computer for business use was an AST286 premium.
and I thought it was as good as it gets, what a wonderful thing.

My introduction to computers was just 'after' the age of punch cards and fortran on main frame units. I first wrote code for an 8k commodore PET desktop machine with the chiclet keyboard... using a cassette drive for storage of the code.

i can top ya on tooth cutters glenn (but just by a little). i started out on an IBM 370/138, punch cards in and out, and god help you if you dropped the deck. we moved up to a 4341 a couple of months after i started, and i remember the old removable pack hard drives. those were the days, when we thought it couldn't get any better, when tapes hit 6250 bpi (that's bits per inch larry, or take 1 inch of tape, and cut it into 6250 slices...).

Well, we just banged rocks together and added up the number of clicks. And that was after swimming to school upstream (both ways) underwater to avoid the poisonous volcanic gasses. And we LIKED it!

Durned kids.



My first computer recollections were seeing the big mainframes at the labs in Los Alamos back in the early '60s. Both parents worked for the labs, and I saw the computers during an open house event. The high point of the demonstration was when the computer played "Happy Birthday" for the crowd.

I didn't start getting any real hands-on computer time until the mid '80s.

I Remember watching Sputnik go overhead when I was a Freshman in College, and then two of my classmates that I took all the math & Science courses with in HS worked through those early years as Engineers at NASA, (One right out of college and the other after three or four years with Hughes in Europe), and both stayed until retirement. I used to visit them at NASA/Houston quite often and take friends for "Special Tours" (where the General Public couldn't go). Both of them had many stories to tell me about the really interesting Projects they had personally done or were in charge of.

In the early '60 s the AF saw fit to pull me out of the Field, operating some "Special" Electronic Equipment, and sent me to the HQ USAF, Technical Applications Center outside DC. A couple of months later they sent 5 of us to a SUPER Accelerated Programing Course at the IBM Education Center in DC (which conveniently omitted the part about how to operate the computer). I think Fortran, an IBM 1401 and an IBM 7074 computer, (with all its tape drives that took up a whole room about half the size of a High School Gym) and punching the cards to go card to tape was what gave me a PERMANENT HATRED for Computers. I had surprisingly good skills for for assessing project desires/needs and doing the Logic Flow Charts, but absolutely LOATHED "Writing" the machine language", punching cards and "Testing". After a "VERY" short period, (and since I was the only one that Really knew the Field Equipment and its capabilities), I became the interface between 4 Engineers, 1 Statistician, and the Programming Department. I just took their wishes, determined if the project was feasible, and if so, drew the Flow charts with all the data specs and then "DROPPED it off" on the Chief Programmers Desk. (I Really Liked That LAST Part).

When I left the AF in '65, I NEVER TOUCHED a Computer of ANY KIND again for 38 years, (and then, didn't remember one single thing I had ever learned about them, which wasn't much).

Now Y'all know why I'm so Computer Stupid, eh? Maybe it's just a Mental Block problem, (now compounded by Short Term Memory as well).

Back when I was doing exports out of California, before the PC era began, I used to ship disc drives that looked like washing machines, controllers looked like refridgerators... I could get two controllers and 4 disk drives in an aircraft igloo cargo container... the floor was 88 x 125 inches...

When the PC era began, anything that was capable of ANY kind of dual processing had to have an export license... I had to determine the "baud" rate on any computer I was exporting and if the baud rate exceeded a certain level (which I don't remember), the machine couldn't be exported... or I had to make application for a special treasury department (A "T" license)..... the license application was 4 or 5 pages of lots of technical information, most of which I didn't understand and still don't....

My first experience of working on a computer, TWA went technical in 1972 or 73... they bought a canned program from Alitalia... to enter and process an airwaybill at origin, rate and ship a shipment required an agent to sign in and out no less than 6 times - until they finally got the program refined some and we only needed 3 sign-ins.

I may not go as far back as some of you but the first machine I programmed on was an IBM 1401 - punched cards in, punched cards out. Then you took the punched cards to another machine and it printed the output.

Also programmed on an IBM 7090. Then we got a 360 in - don't remember the model but it must have been something like a 360/50.

Programmed in Fortran, Cobol, and assembler. Worked as a system programmer for a while working down in the guts of the machine. Looking back, the operating system was pretty basic, but it looked pretty complex to me at the time. Reading those system dumps was a challenge (and a HUGE waste of paper.)

I tend to think in assembler. But I have friends who are programmers and they think differently because of the language they work in (JAVA). I'd have a tough time programming today - I'd have to be completely re-trained.

Mike

I still have a flow chart, punch cards, output sheets from a Cobol class I took in 1980.

for me it was mid to late 70's with fortran, cobol, pascal, assembler, and then later basic. still use the cobol here and there, have a company that has problems now and then and none of the kids today know anything about it (i think it is funny). the big thing i remember is when DOS came out

With all the current news about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, some details are coming out that haven't been previously publicly discussed. One, very interesting episode involved the computers overloading during the descent of the module to the moon surface. It went into an 'error' mode many times during the descent because the computer couldn't process the data coming into it. I wonder what the capacity of that 'puter was and what we would have in there today.

Hi Frank

Thats what they covered in the series i have been watching on our knowledge channel. By the way the series is available on DVD for $20 from Amazon.

Apparently it had 72Kbytes of ram. At the time 60% of all integrated circuits went to NASA.

The reason the computer continued to function was the invention of the concept of priority being placed on different programs. So if it was overloaded it just dropped certain lower priority routines.

I found this series of documentaries very interesting with all sorts of details and interviews with the actual inventors and engineers that did the work.

For any of you space nerds who might be interested, NASA is playing the entire Apollo 11 mission audio in real time + 40 years. It started on July 16, two hours and 40 years before the mission launched and will end July 24 with the splashdown of the astronauts’ capsule.

So far, I've only heard a bit of talking, but it sounds like things are about to get busy. They just mentioned that it's 12 minutes until powered descent.

Gee thanks for that Vaughn, I have just tuned in. To me its still exciting all these years later. When it happened we did not have TV in SA at the time so i listened in on the radio broadcasts. Boy it was something i will never forget. I think the whole world shared the moment with the USA. You guys must have been pretty proud people when this happened.

Frank Fusco said:

With all the current news about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, some details are coming out that haven't been previously publicly discussed. One, very interesting episode involved the computers overloading during the descent of the module to the moon surface. It went into an 'error' mode many times during the descent because the computer couldn't process the data coming into it. I wonder what the capacity of that 'puter was and what we would have in there today.

Click to expand...

That leads to an interesting trivia question. Does anyone here know what the primary computer systems is on today's space shuttles?

















Triple redundent Apple II's.