Here is a succinct but informative article on the flight computer used on the Apollo missions. Amazingly, it “had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.”
The flight computer used on the Apollo missions
Here is a succinct but informative article on the flight computer used on the Apollo missions. Amazingly, it “had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.”
You can build your own:
Build Your Own NASA Apollo Landing Computer (no kidding) (there are several sites that collect Pultorak’s work)
And here’s a comparison with the XT:
How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer
Cool. Can I build my own Saturn V too?
I did that in about the 5th grade, c/o the Estes Model Rocket kit! The rocket on the Charter kid’s shelf is the same Saturn V-B model I built and launched back then. The darn thing used so many engines, I couldn’t afford to launch it very often. I guess now Homeland Security would ban such launches or Obama would send a spy drone after our little rocket launching asses.
I live near the airport, and in my neighborhood, model rocket launches are verboten. I can drive about 10 miles to a city park that is designated for use by model rocketeers and RC aircraft use.
Most Radio Shack stores now stock microcontroller development boards (a.k.a. “dev” boards). These are small single board computers based on single chip computers designed for embedded applications.
One of the newer designs is the “Propeller”, a micro-controller featuring 8 32bit processors, video circuitry and other io ports. Some people have actually written emulators for popular 8 bit computers from the 1980’s that run on a single propeller dev board. A working AGC replica might be an interesting project.