Quote:
Originally Posted by LonelySpoon
I'm always amazed that the entire Saturn V was designed using paper and slide rules.
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Though slide rules were used extensively for myriads of tasks
in the design of the Saturn, it is somewhat of a whimsical notion that
they were used exclusively.
Pretty powerful mainframe and mini computers were also used at the
time, including the Honeywell 1800 (1964), the IBM 7090 and
various models of the fabulous IBM 360 (introduced 1965).
So before the Saturn V was even built, IBM 7090's were
used to perform the initial calculations to determine thrust and trajectory
of the vehicle.
Software like LUMINARY which was the name of the program for the
Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) installed in the Lunar Module (LM) were
originally coded and simulated on Honeywell 1800 and IBM 360/75 mainframes.
A model 360/75 was a pretty powerful machine. 32-bit with the famed
general purpose 360 instruction set and had about a MIPs performance.
(The number 360 came from the fact the computer was all-encompassing
for both scientific and business calculations - 360 degrees - and a
compass motif appeared in the logo). The 360 had in-built floating point
support, parallel arithmetic, interleaved memory, 256K of core memory.
All in all pretty capable.
IBM was a prime contractor on the Saturn V. The Saturn V
Instrumentation Unit or "IU" was a ring that stood atop the third stage
and along its interior walls were the Saturn V guidance computers.
It was no coincidence that many of the components within these
computers were borrowed from the IBM 360 circuitry.
There were also good mini computers available at the time like the
Dec PDP-8 series.
But in the 1960's, a lot of people just commonly used electo-mechanical
desktop calculators like the Marchants and the luckier, including NASA
during the Apollo program, used the Olivetti Programma 101. These
were similar to calculators today in they supported add, subtract,
multiply and divide and could do square roots. Plus they were programmable!
I remember playing with these type of calculators in the 1960's where
my father worked. Often an Olivetti was brought back to our home
after work. It was always fun to give them a long division and
watch them chug away. But they were pretty amazing.
See "The Calculator that Helped Land Men on the Moon" at the
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers web site here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-calcul...en-on-the-moon
Wikipedia on the Olivetti Programma 101 desktop calculator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101
Video of one in operation :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcaNhfOKjIE
Promotional video :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnItIQSwfSw
Pictures of Honeywell 1800 and IBM 360/75 installations below,
a Marchant calculator and an Olivetti Programma 101 desktop
calculator
