dave_blob
Every starry eyed AI/ML piece has me thinking, yes but where's the power going to come from? And where's the power on top to encrypt all this?
And quantum computing? Super-cooling at scale? Aye right pal.
The elegance of the AGC and it's approach to computing could provide a good starting point to a solution out of our mess.
to quote from a 2004 paper by Don Eyles, one of the AGC programmers:
"When Hal Laning designed the Executive and Waitlist system in the mid 1960's, he made it up from whole cloth with no examples to guide him. The design is still valid today. The allocation of functions among a sensible number of asynchronous processes, under control of a rate- and priority-driven preemptive executive, still represents the state of the art in real-time GN&C computers for spacecraft."
More than doubling the number of visible man made objects (~200 till the start of the SpaceX Starlink project).
And with fcc approval for another 12,000 and plans for a further 30,000.
It excites me alright, but certainly not in a good way...
I was (partially) wrong about the un-synced frequency though. The synchro's for the docking radar ran from a different power circuit than the AGC, and whilst they were frequency locked they weren't in phase; resulting in timings getting thrown off and the priority issues.
Edit: Superb deep dive on AGC in Ars from last week https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/a-deep-dive-into-the...