For reasons passing understanding, this video falsely asserts that they did it all in two weeks, which really undersells just how much effort this crew went through. It took MONTHS of work. The first video in the series Marc did came out Nov 13, 2018 and the final working run wasn't posted until Jul 16, 2019. The whole team did an amazing job, over a long period of time.

The brain power in that room is freaking impressive. I felt dumb just watching

This computer is absolutey priceless. Congratulations to the whole team.

I’d love to see them hook up a control stick and run it as a simulation on a modern computer so that someone can manually “land on the moon” using the AGC. That would be so cool!

*2 KB worth of RAM and a 4 MHz CPU landed Apollo 11 on the moon. It's really hard to comprehend that in 2019.* 😂😂😂😂

And today you have people with the latest smartphones and still believe that the earth is flat.

Even just getting it cleaned up, performing repairs, and diagnostics is an achievement.

It couldn't had ended up in better hands. Well done guys. You saved this piece of history from the junkyard. You can all be very proud of yourselves!!!

It's so awesome that he chose to restore the AGC. He easily could have just auctioned it off, made a couple hundred grand and called it a day. Taking the time and effort to get it up and running makes the whole thing just so much cooler.

I'm surprised it didn't churn for a long time and then spit out a response: "42."

It hurts me that such historical artifacts ended up as scrap instead of in a museum or a historical collection but, on the other hand, it may had been this that made it possible for this computer to end up in the right hands after all, and I'm happy it did!

Big thanks to Jimmie Locke for finding and taking care of this computer, and to CuriousMarc for producing such an amazing series about the restoration

It still amazes me that something so complex at the time was the start of the computer tech that we now take for granted. To me it seems unbelieveable that our mobile phones contain more circuits & processing power etc than the ones that actually landed man on the Moon. Congratulations to Marc & his team for preserving a very special part of exploration history.

I watched every bit of the videos they posted about the restoration. Amazingly interesting stuff. Hearing the programs were gone, nothing could run it, nobody knew nothing about nothing, so gratifying to see the restoration bring together the programmers and run the program.

I watched this series on Marc's UKposts channel from day one and it was an incredible journey!! The series has some incredible moments and absolutely worth checking out. As a space tech enthusiast, I wish I had enough brain power to have had even a small part in this project.

So glad these guys are preserving this amazing machine! To have it power up and run after such a long time is an amazing achievement.

Our modern computers have tons of memory and CPU speed, just to watch porn and memes.

When androids rule the world they will be thankful and, therefore, merciful to their organic creators for keeping alive their ancestors.

This is the rare Wall Street Journal video that isnt complete BRAINROT. I really like the narrator imo. WSJ should keep this team around. They have a knack for finding quality content.

This is fantastic. I am glad I found it. THanks guys for restoring this awesome piece of history. Hard to believe that all that equipment would "fit" into a simple chip today.

The past must be studied in order to understand our present and then plan for our future. Old tech is always a humbling kick right in the commodity of what we take for granted!

This was a thoroughly fascinating project. I watched all the videos. Simply amazing. When they powered up the computer memory, and recovered the last state of the computer in magnetic memory - including the latitude and longitude - you felt like you were there 50 years ago. A very impressive achievement. This was most deserving of being featured by WSJ - it is very inspirational for our creators of the future.

I remember following along with the progress on Marc's channel. It's such an interesting trip through reverse engineering with some heavyweights. Ken Shirriff is such a titan of reversing silicon that it's crazy. It's amazing they sussed out the inner workings and managed to make it work at all.

When they turn on the guidance system... suddenly the lunar lander in the National Air and Space Museum fires up and starts flying around randomly :D

I'm an electronic professor from Barcelona and I explain the students what is the AGC and show them the schematics. I wish they are fascinated as me!!! Thank you.

CuriousMarc's video series on this was a nail bitter --- every video was gold and I couldn't wait for the next one. The last video was so satisfying.

I watched every one of Marc's videos. It was an incredible achievement, and one that I hope will be celebrated for years.

This guidance computer shows how innovative and ahead of its time this computer was. It also demonstrates how the experts managed to build something that nobody can really recreate due to it's complexity.

I am an enthusiast of the Apollo missions. I love to see a group of sinior gentlemen dedicated with passion to recover the past for the next generations. I congratulate you and wish you success and recognition in this noble venture.

That man is a true Patriot. What an irreplaceable gift he has bestowed.

Nice one!. I can remember being a young boy in the late seventies going with my father to work on several weekends, they were working on one of the first computerised credit card systems in the UK, possibly the first kn the world (waits for gnashing of teeth etc, have the dates of it going live). They were writing code on machines that only had 32k of memory, it took half of that to get them going.... They did it, I still have the keyring Dad got from IBM (a 'failed' memory chip) encased in plastic after a business trip to the USA to get the kit needed. This kind of kit needs to be preserved!. I might add, my first home computer only had 64k of ram in the eighties... Gòod on you!.

This is really cool! I am feeling so excited watching their smiles as they powered it back up.

What a noble challenge: putting the effort to preserve for future generations this computer system and hard wired programming.

I'd love to have a replica of this. Powered by Rasberry Pii or something similar. Lots of companies make components for flight simulator cockpits and so on, so maybe one of them could try to make a Lunar Module Guidence Computer replica. Just the interface part of course.

This is so cool. Brought a little tear to my eye. My grandfather worked for nasa back in the day, they lived in Huntsville then.

I'm impressed that the young guy was willing to learn the restrictions the designers had in the 60's. Those guys had to work at the lowest levels to get those pieces working. And no compilers to transfer a high level programming language into a binary representation the electronics could understand. I started working with electronics in the early 70's. This video brought back memories.

Really cool that a guy like Jimmie managed to find that computer. What cool project!

Hey WSJ, help get a 2 hr PBS NOVA documentary going. Marc’s multipart restoration video series is award winning. And pair his vids with contemporary documentary films. It’s worth it!!

I started working on circuit boards in the 80s but found it advantageous to look back at previous designs to understand current designs of circuits. It’s best not to trash old equipment once it’s gone it’s gone.

A buddy of mine worked on electronic and computers for the space program in the 1960s. He said there is no way the US went to the moon, with the state of electronics at that time. It would have taken a building full of wires cables and still vacuum tubes, to get a space ship to the moon.

Remarkable, what a worthwhile project. Well done guys.

Good job, thank's for preserving a great part of space exploration history.

This is awesome! A team of hobbyists who are professionals from different generations.

Just tremendous that this piece of history was not only saved but they were brilliant enough to restore it. BRAVO!! 👍🇺🇸👍🇺🇸

Nice to see this video about the project. Sad to read so many comments of people who don't know what they are saying instead of informing themselves. Obviously, I watched the whole series of videos on Curiousmarc's channel and as so many people who comment here I couldn't wait for the next one. This was an amazing project by Marc and his team and to quote Jimmy Loocke: "I hope many people will be able to see this computer many years from now".

I loved learning about Core Rope Memory after watching the other videos...so cool

Beeing a space engineer, I got a tear in my eyes after each episode. It´s an important and great achievement that those guys have done.

I was watching the channel when they first started trying to diagnose it. The levels of difficulty that they had to deal with are dumbfounding; everything from building their own interfaces to interact with the computer, to creating software that would recreate the "mission" and feed data into the Apollo modules. And that was AFTER they had to do things as simple as figuring out which parts of the computer were which; because these are computer parts that any normal tech would be able to recognize.

I watched the entire series of restoration videos without understanding the backstory presented in the wsj video. Marc's series is a must watch for any computer geek.

I have three paperback books from 1969, they are about the Moon landing, what gets me is, there were so few books written at the time? I couldn't find a Hardback book here in UK in 1969 about the moon landings? By 1970 it was old news. But one of the books actually has the schedule of Computer operations that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins ran through on the landing mission. Jimmie Loocke has my admiration, for having the nous to just buy something he wasn't a 100% he knew what he could do with, but realised it was important. From here in UK I salute you, and I'm damned sure (if I might be so bold) most people in USA will do the same.

What a legend, the value of all this stuff will be insane in 200 years, so strange how they were just throwing this stuff away in the 70's.

A round of applause for jimmy loocke and Marc and everyone else who have the drive to restore our historic technology artifacts

CuriousMarc is the channel and if you watched this you NEED to watch the full restoration over there pronto. Amazing job.

What an inspiring story of unlikely heroes. Kudos to all these guys for recognizing the culturally significant items and doing such great work. Very great story. I also love how they came together in a quasi-u official guerilla style. Super cool. Reminded me of oceans 11 haha.

Bravo. We need people like this.

Thank You for posting this!

#HumansAreAwesome Thank you guys for tackling such a beautiful endeavor.

And now many of us hold the equivalent of supercomputers in our hands every day. Very cool to think how quickly computers have and are still advancing.

Great work guys. Your names should go down in history. For the computer restoration work you have done, and for the legacy of the Apollo program. The data on these computers is a record of history. This is one step for computer restoration, and one giant leap for human history in space.

Just some info. Apollo 11's onboard guidance computer had a processing speed of 1 MHz, and had about 4 kilobytes of reusable memory. The original Nintendo Game Boy, released in 1989 a mere 20 years after the first moon landing, was four times faster at 4MHz and had double the memory.

Love this. It’s geeks (in a good way) like them that drive innovation and make the world a better place 👍🏻

Along with the AGC hardware, the advent of software came into being as well. The term "software engineer" was coined by the MIT team.

This is awesome... Regardless of how long it took to get up and running, it is cool to see how something so old and now days outdated could do such monumental task and be such a big part of history

There is another UKposts channel called Smarter Every Day that went and did a whole episode on Saturn V guidance computer at the Huntsville Space Center and he interviewed the engineer who worked on it. It's fascinating to watch. The memory was all set by hand. Each transistor, every single wire, components, everything. It will truly blow your mind

In 1969 a computer like that would have filled the basement of a skyscraper. It would have needed a raised floor for cooling..This device was ten years ahead of its time in an era when a single years advancement doubled processing power. IC chips were invented in 1961 but there was no single chip computer, that did not happen until 1971 at Intel. The machine they are playing with is a nugget of technology. VERY HISTORIC.

Many years ago I met a Radiologist in New York that had a flight computer from the Apollo project. His name was Dr.Hori a Japanese American.

those guy's are AWESOME I don't really understand a lot of what they are doing , but it is so cool to watch them bring the old equipment back to life ,,,, I feel like Penny on The Big Bang watching them 😁

Good to know. Thank you for sharing.🙏

CuriousMarc's AGC restoration is an epic!

i am so disapointed that nasa discarded those computer after the mission and not keeping them in a museum for everyone to see

Absolutely amazing! I wish WSJ had included a link to Marc's channel in their description.

So neat! Nice piece of history restored! Great video!

5:34 - is this Scott Manley there in the left??

The restoration team is composed entirely of brilliant, motivated and amazingly talented individuals -- an uncommon blend of genius focused on a common problem. Still, Mike Stewart is a prodigy among them. To possess such a depth and breadth of knowledge on this important piece of history 50 years on despite his young age -- and then to be in a position to *apply* that knowledge . . . well, it was quite an experience to witness, even if only through UKposts.

The fact we able to document this historical data is in itself a task of love and hard work.

keep up the great work restoring these gems of history Thank you

Thank you Wall Street Journal for broadening the awareness of this restoration project.

0:28 can't be unseen...

Awesome!! Thank you for sharing!!

A brilliant team restoring a brilliant historic computer. We need to remember how computer hardware and software engineering started, so we can understand how it has developed over the past 50+ years. The AGC - the first fly by wire computer.

Curious Marc's videos on the AGC restoration are worth watching again.

I’m happy that this was found and saved! So much critical history has been lost or trashed.

When we landed on the moon it's started my journey into Electronics and I've been in it ever since and I understand a lot of that hardwire that they had to redo because that's my ABC's and 123's..... Also know that I have an uncle who was an engineer on the Apollo missions in California... John Cordan.

Unbelievable stuff and even more amazing that it was all possible with magnetic core memory.

Important elements of the past need to be preserved... Great to see it happening... I thought all of this was kept by NASA? Considering the cold war atmosphere, etc...it is truly breathtaking to see how casual they were about it...

The funny thing is a car made in the early 90s has more computer processing power

What an amazing film ... Love that this guy walked into a warehouse and was like "yo...." and saw what he saw. I'm holding onto my Commodore64 but doubt it will have this kinda impact;)

I followed this on Marc’s You Tube Chanel ......as a retired electronics engineer it is fascinating stuff. Some very clever people doing interesting stuff!

Maybe now we can go back to the moon

Watched all of the CuriousMarc restoration videos....kinda happy and sad, when it was over, though.... (it's that young guy who really knows how it works... Mike Stuart.... ) I guess he actually 'built' an AGC equivalent with programmable gate arrays... that literally 'copied' all the electronic logic gates, and memory. I see there are always 'doubters' present.... most of them are either too young, or too ignorant of the 1960's to understand the mindset.... it was a different time.... and we wanted to beat the 'ruskies'.... and we did.....Thanks for the video...

This bring tears from my eyes.

Everyone is born with brilliance.....what a great team!

Absolutely amazing! Great that people like this are alive! What a thing to end up on the scrap heap! And to the 78 dislikes to this video... Wow.. what a sad existence you must live. 👍🏻

Hi Scott Manley! @5:32

Incredible. Bravo!!

I’m glad there’s people like this in the world

The---most important computer built, was the first one (programmable) ''COLOSSUS'' AT BLETCHLEY PARK ENGLAND, 1944.

There is no try. There is only do, or do not. They did. Period.

Brilliant job guys.. Living history

I'm very impressed with the computer restoration of the lunar module. WOW