Thanks Gary, but Whoops – though I had lost the colour calibration profile on my monitor, it was all in B&W.
I loved the pre-PowerPoint diagrams, charts and illustrations and the concept of using San Francisco Bay as a landmark for the navigation computer.
I was also so surprised to see a motorised GoTo operation commanding the on-board telescope back in 1965, well before the modern era of GoTo mounts.
The comment about the Apollo Computer being similar to much larger ground-based computers “
that are dominating our lives today” was quite humorous, given this was back in, wait for it… 1965!
The DSKY Verbs and Nouns input method wasn’t lost on me given that this is what we do today; Print: DocumentName, Open: Filename, Send: E-mailMessage, etc.
It was very interesting to see how they tested the discrete components, the metal can semi-conductors going through accelerated burn-in, environmental shock at 20,000G, thermal cycling to account for the extremes of temperatures, etc. And, if 1 in the test batch failed, the whole batch was rejected, and a new batch submitted for test. This obviously predated the modern Quality Management movement, whereby conformance to requirements are designed and built into the product, rather than just trying to “test quality” at the end.
Loved the automated wiring and welding machines that created the Logic Sticks and the hand weaving of the ferrite cores. The machinery to index the correct location for the assembler to pass the wire through the core was quite remarkable, controlled by IBM punch cards.
It took 512 cores and over ½ mile of wire to represent over 65,000 pieces of information. Gulp!
Another mindblower was seeing the density and complexity of the wiring pattern at the back plane of the memory tray assembly which required a machine to route the wires according to a program.
Those were the days eh!
Cheers
Dennis