Computers and reboots... together forever. But with me and naps, how can I judge?

M mks mop mind man mmmmmmm mom m know mml NJ mmm blink mom mm MP nmmmn much m ZzzszzZ lml mom LMK blink

Interestingly there is an asteroid called Scottmanley

Spec four gimbals next time, oh just use MEMs.

Add a few more zeros to the hours spent to compute and refine the computation. The people involved in the math race were ran ragged by the end.

just recreate it in fpga and boom.

Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V

If the code is in there and not examined, it may as well not be in there.

Hear, hear! :) Without the code, the computer is meaningless - it is just a hunk of metal and silicon. Its actual historical function can only be understood by reference to the code which made it perform that function. If that code is locked up inside the hardware, it is "critically endangered" - a mishap could destroy it forever. Every copy of it held externally to the hardware is a vital historical "insurance policy". Arguably, the code is even more important than the hardware: should the hardware be lost, the code would still provide deep insight into the inner workings of the launch vehicle and, indeed, the collective thought processes of the design team and it could still be run under emulation or even on a replica of the hardware if schematics are available or were to come to light in future. Were the code to be lost, any hypothetical replica hardware would still be of little value.

I always hope a certain frenchman can get a look into one the AGS...

@@fabiosemino2214 They're much harder to come by, from what I can tell. I currently only know the location of a single one in a private collection outside of museums. And so far we haven't been able to locate any schematics at all for it, which would make things quite a bit harder than we had with the AGC.

@@mikestewart8928 Drop a line to Curious Marc on UKposts. They have a full set of schematics for the AGC and multiple dumps of the LM code from different versions.

@@fabiosemino2214 yea, but I only hope that when he restores / rebuilds one of those he swaps out all the old paper and electrolytic capacitors which they dind't do with the Teletyper powersupply restore, instead they tried to reform them 🙄That's just asking for trouble 😨

@@allangibson8494 Ahem. Mike is the one in the team who gave us all the schematics and dumped the LM code...

roflmao

"Speaking of programming, about those algorithms..."

After a ggl search I can not find any references to this, do you have any citations?

Calm Volatility Whoosh!

@@calmvolatility2787, To dissect the joke. The code was called "Corona". To prevent spread of misinformation about of the current pandemic, youtube algorithms try to suppress every mentioning of the sickness in any context. In effect every mention of "corona" would get you "demonetized".

Wait till you read what ‘patch’ originally meant :)

Hardwired to selfdestruct......

Covered pretty much every concept from college level computer hardware classes.

yeah more nasa BS.

@@romhackstashbox1275 You sound bitter. That can only mean one thing. You think it's a CONSPIRACCCCCCCCCCYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!! Lol!

@@romhackstashbox1275 More probably IBM bs - they haz secretssses - trixy Hobbitses they isss -

Rom Hack Stash Box don’t fall off the edge when the quarantine is over, lol

does it work in latest build? i thought mechjeb got retired?

Spunkmire yeah it works, there was an update not too long ago

What ship where you on?

What exactly did it do? Did you ever use it in serious combat? Did you like it? What was the worst thing about it? Tell us more before you die and the ancient computers with you :(

@@G4m3G3ni3 The fire control computer interfaced the radar, launchers, and tactical data system together and also gave the missiles rudimentary (compared to today,) guidance orders. The beauty of core memory is they do not require power to retain information. You could shut the power off at any time, come back in six months power up, hit go and the program would restart at the next instruction. But, it is slow, power intensive, and expensive. And huge space wise. The Data converter unit was it's own refrigerator size enclosure, for 16 data channels. Data passed through dozens of 90 conductor armored cables, relay switch boards, and electromechanical switches. The computer on my desk is thousands of time more powerful, compact, and reliable. It also runs on a fraction of the power, and waste heat is still it's biggest enemy. I joke that the biggest 'upgrade' the machine got was when they glued a "SPERRY" tag on the thing when Sperry bought Univac. But the programming was entirely in straight machine code in Octal format, and directly accessible from the front panel. The Terrier missile system used 32K of core ram, half of full capacity, but double what the Tarter system used. There was also a Teletype machine to access sumo sub-programs, and input instruction for training and testing purposes. Maintenance of that was nightmarish! Hope that satisfies your curiosity.

@@kevinbendall9119 I hope you got the paperwork declassifying all that given how the US Navy famously prolongs the classified status of some technology.

@@kevinbendall9119 "core memory is they do not require power to retain information" Yup. ferrite. little toroidal magnets.

Fran Blanch gave EEVblog some LVDC chips to test.

They were at an auction to get more parts, but couldn't because of course some rich f*ck bought them because of the 50 yo anniversary. Now they will rot in some garbage home of poor garbage taste. I hate these f*cks with a passion. This is why channels like CuriousMarc should be supported, so that they have the money to outbid these rotten, useless pigs. One shinning beacon of this method is Steve1989, who reviews military rations from every era and age, along with military kits and so on. Some of the things he shows, are not even recorded. It took me months to dig out some information on some of the things he showed as physical items. Those rations (insert here, anything of historical value) would've rotten in some dumbass' collection, never to be seen again, were it not for him.

aserta in fairness Marc got access to the AGC from a rich benefactor and was able to keep the code after the restoration. Not all collectors want to lock everything up. But I get your point none the less.

@@dmacpher It wasn't a rich benefactor. It was a guy who bought a pile of Apollo scrap for cheap. He became rich decades after, by selling the perfectly working computer.

The only complete LVDCs with functional code inside are stuck inside Saturn V on display at museums.

It's actually surprisingly simple because these days you can assume to have access to logic gates that just work "out of the box" - and then all you need to worry about is just the pure binary logic. And designing a CPU using just logic gates is, although not trivial, not incredibly difficult either, it's something many students and hobbyists alike are able to and often do just for kicks, or as personal projects. I've designed a 16-bit CPU from bare-bones, starting with just a NAND-logic gates (which itself is just made out of either 2 or 4 transistors, depending on the semiconductor technology used), and it's actually quite surprising how little it takes to have a fully functional CPU that can do all the common mathematical operators and access RAM & ROM, etc. Back when these guys were doing it though? An absolute nightmare to achieve the same.

Hm, nope. It looks nothing like that.

The OP is talking about how spaceships maneouvre in vacuum versus how aircraft fly in an atmosphere. The “Star Wars” fighters banked and turned like aircraft, not spaceships.

or nasa copyed kubrick since no one has ever been to space. or wait kubrick worked with NASA.

@@romhackstashbox1275 or you are conspiratard, and probably a flat earther too. Get lost. Go read the bible or something and leave the rocket science to the adults.

Who filmed it though!!!!????

It's a good job Apollo happened in the 1960s and early 70s. A decade later and it might all have been shot on VHS for posterity.

That ring is the interstage and isn't related to the Instrument unit.

The lovely interstage separation (skirt sep) shots. Ahhhhhh. As Scott said, that was the skirt surrounding the S-IIs 5 J2 engines. The IU (instrument unit) is where the LVDC and the analog computer were. That sat atop the S-IVB, and stayed with it until it crashed into the moon, or was sent on a wild ride around the sun, as in the case of Apollo 12. The IU had to stay attached, to still control the trajectory and transmit data. In the case of Apollo 13, after the explosion, the IU was causing interference in communication with the LM, because it was essentially hijacking frequencies from the weaker Omnidirectional antennas that were used. They had to push the S-IVB out of the way a bit. Sorry, this turned into a long thing lol

He's not that old

@@eFeXuy Just edited my comment. He would be there to do a job.

@@pentagramprime1585 : Is Scott trained in computer design? He might be a mismatch for the initial extraction job.

@@absalomdraconis I was gonna suggest he bring help. But my comment was already becoming rather lengthy. If nothing else I'd like him to be there to document the work. Furthermore, it would be in the museums interest to facilitate such an operation. They would be curating the original code.

and then we put it on 4 arduinos and fly to mars.

Actually, there are quite a few architectures in common use. Your wi-fi router is probably running a MIPS processor. SiFive is gathering momentum. And if you look at the world’s fastest supercomputers, you’ll see a few POWER machines near the top. What do these processors have in common? They all run Linux.

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Lets not forget RISC-V, the great hope for an open hardware future! Much more common, if humble, is the processor inside all those Arduinos!

Yes Mike, some were fascinating. But some were just frustrating. Have a look at the architecture of the CDC Cyber range. For no particularly sensible reason that I ever heard about, Seymour Cray cursed them with a very limited address size, although the data word length was 60-bits - arranged as octal. They were a dreadfully limited thing to try to use as a more general-purpose computer, or even with really big, complex programs. Then Cray went off to create his dream machine... declaring memory size to be the really big advantage of the Cray-1! I remember reading the article on the notice board as we awaited the arrival of a CDC Cyber 72, and wondering just how this would turn out!

@@John.0z Sorry, yes, I meant RISC-V. SiFive is just one of many companies embracing that architecture.

lol. Because I still mess with old microcomputers I still run into things every so often... Like, you wouldn't think so from a modern point of view, but early 80's keyboards can be surprisingly annoying thanks to the missing buttons. Like, on my desk here is an Atari 800XL. Has no equivalent to the 'alt' key on a modern keyboard (though it does have a dedicated key for 'inverted' characters, which on older revisions of the hardware was an 'atari' key.) Control is in a weird location, there's no function keys, arrow keys are bound as secondary functions to something else... Oh, and of course the standard software for entering programs assumes 'overwrite' is permanently active (and there's no insertion mode the way a modern system would tend to default to. To insert characters requires pressing the insert key repeatedly then typing new characters in the space opened up) For good measure, this system's text is encoded in something called 'atascii' (atari character set) Which is similar to ASCII but nonetheless quite incompatible with it anyway. while we're at it, due to the nature of the machine, you're often working with it at a low level. And... Well, not only is the official character set ATASCII which is it's own thing. But the internal numbering of the standard font doesn't even align with the ATASCII code (the OS/BASIC ROM internally translates), and the keyboard scan codes are a 3rd arrangement unrelated to the other two. Because, hey, who needs consistency right?

@@KuraIthys A highly modern computing project I follow needed updated patches for EBCDIC compatibility, and that was April 2020.

@@KuraIthys I used to do some programming on the original Atari 800 (in 6502 assembly, of course) and I agree. Trying to translate programs from other computers was always oh-so-much fun. Although, having the complete OS source code was very helpful in circumventing a lot of silliness. It's just what life was like back then. I'd be bouncing between various UNIVACs, DEC Vaxes and PDPs, HP minis, a plethora of 6502, 8080, Z80, 8086 and 68000 PCs all using different monitors and OSs and all in their particular machine/assembly languages. Not to mention the dozen or so "common" higher level languages for various purposes. Without a doubt, one of the funnest times of my life. If you can be on the bleeding edge of a paradigm shift, ride it as long as you're able.

I'm swimming in fun...

lets put it this way, ive heard claims that the entire Apollo computing system could have been run on an original gameboy, im inclined to believe it

Alessandro Bianchi by an enormous factor ! The orbit calculations were done on the ground and radioed up. KSP does those as you play and does hundreds of geometric calculations per pixel each second, on top of it.

Alessandro Bianchi god damn...... Brain blow

Computing power isn't everything. It's how you apply it. Here's a simple example. I've a top of the line laptop for work. It has to have as good a computing/computation power i can get, to give me the correct architectural solutions IN a portable format as fast as possible. If i need to know if a beam isn't ok, then i need it fast. THAT is great, it's awesome, and it made my life much easier. But this laptop, for the life of it, cannot interface with the CNC machine that makes the custom fit beams we use in restoring old buildings. It needs another "computer" to run the stepper motors, read the scales, so on. And that's just a modern concept, back then they had to deal with a heck of a lot more things, like vacuum, cooling, heating, fire hazards, robustness. IMO, the computers that were put to work were the best they could be at the job they had to do, after all, you can't run a rocket with a modern laptop, anymore than you can use one of those old computers to run a computational program...but you could make a CNC out of one, and it would be the best CNC money could buy, because precision was adamant.

Except that the Saturn control computer and the ACCs actualy controls the vehicles. Almost anything developed since has more computing capacity and more memory but lacks the I O hardware needed to do anything.

Actually by the time of the manned missions making core rope was mostly automated. The machine Scott showed in this video moved the core rope to the correct place, the lady (they were all ladies) just had to push the wire through, then the machine moved to the next place etc.

I don't think the mentioned problems are real/relevant in the modern computing, everything is using 64 bit, even phones. As for pendrives - it's just the stupidity of defaulting to FAT instead of formatting everything in NTFS by default (licensing reasons... ?). That is, unless you're targeting some semi-custom platform like a weirdo router that uses some CPU architecture forgotten by time.

A diverse ecosystem is valuable. That’s why Linux supports something like two dozen different major processor architectures-more than any other OS in history. And it also supports a wide variety of filesystems, not just NTFS.

There was a major schism at the time between 36 and 32 bits; 36-bit octal machines such as the PDP-10 were popular in research circles because a single word gave you ten decimal digits of precision. Xerox PARC, for example, wanted a PDP-10 so badly that when Xerox management denied them permission to buy one, they built their own clone of it out of components and called it the Xerox MAXC. The 32-bit machines, however, were cheaper and IBM-sponsored, so they were more popular with management types and therefore more successful in the market. And that's why everything today is a 32 or 64-bit hexadecimal machine, while 18 and 36-bit octal machines are forgotten. The worst enemy of a superior solution is a cheaper inferior that is just good enough...

@@randomname3566 fat32 is kinda the lowest common denominator. Apple and MS insist on closed proprietary hyjinx.

There was rather more than just 32 or 36. There were also 24-bit, 48-bit, and 60-bit machines, just to mention a few.

"Everything rises and falls on leadership." -John Maxwell If the organization get its people right, the right people in the right roles using the right skills and tools will handle all the technical details.

So much careful design went into it. The two absolutely critical engines that, if they didn’t fire, the men would be left marooned in space or on the Moon-the Service Module and the LM Ascent stage-were hypergolic. That means their ignition only depended on simple on/off valves working properly, not on more complicated throttles, pumps etc. The initial trajectory to the Moon was “free return”, which meant that if nothing further was done, they would simply come back to Earth again. This is what happened with Apollo 13, where the main issue was figuring out how to last the time it took for the trip back.

There's already a video on this, from the 1960s. It's called "computer for Apollo".

yep, we've all got a mental glitch of some sort,