There's so much more I want to know. Who put it on the trash heap? Why did the FBI come looking for it years later? Embarrassment?

OTOH, back in those days, maybe there was more of a sense of pushing things forward, and less nostalgia, and maybe that was a good thing. I can't decide if I like having every speck of computer history catalogued and put in a museum. For one thing, I fear that 50 years from now, people will cling to the stories of the creators of Android or iOS or Pokemon Go, and somehow that old Nokia flip phone I have in my junk box will be a museum piece.

Nostalgia. Can't live with it, can't live without it.

I worked at a university where a lot of various research in physics, computer vision, and structural engineering was done.

Often researchers and tenured staff held on to such artifacts but eventually retired or died.

Their offices were emptied out by random staff who had no clue of the significance of their possessions and thrown out of left in a collection bin in the hallway.

I've got a few gems I rescued from such situations, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was what happened, even if not, it's worth knowing that this happens :(

I used to keep a box of eight-inch floppy disks in my office. Whenever a colleague would ask to borrow a blank disk (in the 3.5" era) I would give them one of these eight-inch disks. Many of my colleagues were so young they didn't even know what it was, not ever having used even a 5.25" floppy. It was always a great conversation starter.

Until the era of thumb drives came along...

> Why did the FBI come looking for it years later? Embarrassment?

I'd wager it has more to do with the... significant overlap between rocket guidance and long range missile guidance. Nothing to stir up a good panic like the thought of the latter ending up in North Korea's hands - how much good it'd actually do NK being entirely besides the point.

Probably just to determine if it was still US Government property.

After Apollo 11, President Nixon presented moon rock samples as gifts to various countries and states. Over 180 of them are now missing, and the FBI investigates people who are allegedly selling them (hint: they're usually fakes)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_moon_rocks

The original footage of the moon landings was actually erased and recorded over when NASA had a shortage of data tapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes. So yeah there is definitely some pragmatism at NASA.

You're forgetting about all the other Apollo landing missions. The later ones have fantastic color video footage, remastered in full HD for episode 4 of the fantastic documentary series When We Left Earth.

The whole 6 part documentary series are worth watching for anyone remotely interested in space, but here's a small sample of the quality of the moon landing video footage: https://kristofferR.com/files/moonlanding_footage_HD.mkv

it's as if they want you to forget what happened.

Let's just focus on a space station and travelling to the red planet we know little about. What footprints on the moon?

Only the original footage was lost. It was still broadcast to millions and there are multiple recordings of these broadcasts. If you read the article you'd find that NASA actually released a restored version of the footage. So no, they don't want you to forget what happened. Lastly I know it's pretty hip to be a conspiracy theorist, but there's a really good video rebutting common claims for it being faked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXTF6bs1IU

I don't think he was implying that we never landed on the moon, just that the NASA manned program's priorities today have a misguided set of priorities. There was a scathing article posted about it last night

I got a different impression from "What footprints on the moon?" At least to me it doesn't make sense that NASA would want to forget one of humanity's biggest achievements, especially considering what an accomplishment it was for America during the space race. If you can still find the article it would be great if you could link it so I can maybe get some missing context.

> it's pretty hip to be a conspiracy theorist

I've never observed this to be the case, and I collected conspiracy theories for a good few years. The people who credit them tend in my experience to be a rather close-mouthed lot, not least because they're accustomed to ridicule, and probably the very last word I'd choose to describe them would be 'hip'. I'm curious what you've seen that leads you to consider otherwise.

Long ago I asked this question on quora, it got OK answers including one of my own that's now deleted, but this post prompted me to check on it again and it's now got a really great answer, check it out: https://www.quora.com/During-the-Apollo-launches-what-happen...

In particular I am happy about the timing. They accept inertial guidance to be a bit off because transferring it closer to T=0 would make it less accurate because of rocket vibrations!

I would argue it was first space flight guidance computer.

Technically nazis V1 had analog guidance computer and traveled in space. The same with all later ballistic missiles etc.

Early soviet manned space flights (Vostok, Voschod) were fully automated, in case pilot passes out. Americans did not had that until Apollo.

There was even 'password' login :-) [wiki, Vostok 1]

> The entire mission would be controlled by either automatic systems or by ground control. This was because medical staff and spacecraft engineers were unsure how a human might react to weightlessness, and therefore it was decided to lock the pilot's manual controls. In an unusual move, a code to unlock the controls was placed in an onboard envelope, for Gagarin's use in case of emergency.[7]:278 Prior to the flight, Kamanin and others told Gagarin the code anyway.

Title is editorialized.

Even the US Gemini program had an on-board guidance computer before Apollo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_Guidance_Computer

The V1[1] was a pulsejet powered cruise missile, and while it also had a analog guidance system, I guess you mean V2[2], that was the first long range ballistic missile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket

>"password" login

Insert joke about Cosmonauts being little more than trained monkeys with a stick, and Astronauts just being trained monkeys.

Or were you talking about a different kind of "PAS-sword"?

http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4114/why-is-a-stick...

Gemini had a (much more limited) guidance computer that flew in space: http://history.nasa.gov/computers/ch1-1.html

It didn't provide all the capabilities that the AGC did, but it did provide for navigation calculations and rode inside the capsule.

i think the first digital one was the D-17B, that was the guidance system of the Minuteman ICBM. Wikipedia says it used transistors so that it was a minicomputer, don't know if it had integrated circuits by 1966.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-17B

The Soviet R7 ICBM used a guidance system with tubes so that it was larger - that was a major reason why they needed a bigger missile; and that one would eventually take man to space.

The v2 had a gyroscopic a guidance system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj2QVgfyXik

One of the engineering achievements of the V2 was its guidance system. See "V2" by Dornberger. The heart of the guidance system was a gyroscope that was slowly tilted by a clockwork mechanism.

In nasa's defense, outsiders probably don't realize exactly how much material they were dealing with. This may be a treasured jewel today, but at the time it was just part of the pile. I;m glad this was saved, but we cannot build a museum around every bit if space hardware. SpaceX has their first recovered rocket out front of their offices. In fifty years we might all be yelling at them for keeping such a precious artifact out in the weather.

It's hard to know at the time what will be considered treasures. For example, I've had a lot of computers over the years. I kept a bunch because I was sure they'd be collectors' items.

Turns out, the only collectors' items turned out to be equipment I'd junked. The ones I kept are all junk. Who knew my H-11 would become valuable? :-(

That this thing has surface-mount components on it shows you how crazy ahead of its time it was. This is literally space-age technology in a world that was barely using integrated circuits in consumer products.

I can't even imagine how much one of these modules cost to make at the time they were produced. Tens of thousands surely.

This kind of component mounting was a fore-runner of larger scale integration.

Quite a bit of circuitry from those days was made like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_integrated_circuit

Excellent mechanical properties (esp. with respect to vibration resistance) and more compact than the other mounting methods available at the time, it seems to me to have been the obvious choice for anything on spacecraft or aircraft.

I mean more specifically the way the components are flush-mounted, not in the standard DIP arrangement. They don't require holes drilled in the board, and more importantly, don't penetrate the board itself, so components can be mounted on both sides if necessary without risk of overlapping holes.

I can remember building computers in the early 1990s with logic boards that looked more primitive than what was in this module from the 1960s.

Apparently surface mounting was developed specifically for the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-mount_technology

In Herman Lukoff's autobiography "From Dits to Bits", he describes building a radio where he surface mounted the components to the glass envelope of the vacuum tube. I believe that he constructed it before World War II. Traditional vacuum tube chassis were usually heavy metal assemblies so this was pretty radical.

Unfortunately, once the tube reached operating temperature, his painstakingly hand drawn traces and glued down components delaminated. However, it shows that people were thinking about that sort of thing.

Looking back to the past at the evolving technology exposes the intricacies of genius.

This is amazing. Does anybody care to speculate why the FBI cared or why it would even be on their radar? In terms of technology this is ancient history.

One has to wonder how it ended up in a scrap auction. I would love to know the provenance of that.

Looking for feedback on our page for the AGC

http://theymadethat.com/things/5ug/apollo-guidance-computer

would this even work? my understanding of rope memory was that the value depended partially on the strength of magnets in a certain position in a copper rope.

what happens when the magnet becomes deplolarized? isn't the only way to ensure the bits he's got out are correct to actually inspect the copper weaves? for all we know they were tossed in the trash because they were defective

My guess is that these are ROMs and the weaving pattern determines its contents. In the second video, there's an excerpt from how the modules were made in the factory, and while the address wire is weaved systematically through all cores by two people, the programming part was done with the help of an automatic guiding arm: https://youtu.be/-BlivdwXRZU?t=57s

>what happens when the magnet becomes deplolarized?

I guess then you try the same thing floppy disk rescueing programs did : keep attempting to read it until you have enough data to make a stastistically significant bet. It should work pretty well since you get an analog value encoding a digital one to start with.

I feel like there's a really good answer to this that doesn't involve taking the thing apart, but I'm no EE.

Original article: http://www.gadget.co.za/the-hacker-the-scrapheap-and-the-fir...

If the post title matched that of the page title, it would be a true statement. This was the first Apollo guidance computer, not the first space flight guidance computer.