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This is part two of my three part series from the Vintage Computer Festival on April 6, 2014 in Wall New Jersey. Here I take a look at one of the Apollo Guidance Computers (AGC) with flown components from Apollo 14, and I take a tour through the great exhibits with running 8-bit and 16-bit systems and some demonstrations on how these 70's and early 80's systems worked. You can read about all of the VCF 2014 exhibitors and their computers on the Vintage.org website here: http://www.vintage.org/2014/east/exhibit.php Enjoy!
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This is part two of my three part series from the Vintage Computer Festival on April 6, 2014 in Wall New Jersey. Here I take a look at one of the Apollo Guidance Computers (AGC) with flown components from Apollo 14, and I take a tour through the great exhibits with running 8-bit and 16-bit systems and some demonstrations on how these 70's and early 80's systems worked. You can read about all of the VCF 2014 exhibitors and their computers on the Vintage.org website here: http://www.vintage.org/2014/east/exhibit.php Enjoy!
Fran on Twitter - https://twitter.com/contourcorsets
Fran's Science Blog - http://www.frantone.com/designwritings/design_writings.html
Fran's Daily Updates - http://www.contourcorsets.com/daily/daily.html
I had a Tandy TRS80, colloquially known as a Trash-Eighty. At Primary School we had Microbee 16 and 32's. High School the horrid Apple 2c's, which had nothing on the TI and IBM clones of the day. I used to be a wiz on GW and Microsoft Basic. Ahh, the days before GUI's. Kids these days know almost nothing about programming and real computing. Thanks for the memories.
PDP11 oh wow. The computer with which I began my career interfacing it to a gas exchange system for studying plant ecophysiology at Utah State University in the late 1970s.
I had a boss in 1980 who started a company called Digitize out of his home, which was microcomputers that read a current loop of fire alarm boxes in cities. I believe he is still in business. He swore by his teletype, and we were forced to use one in our EE lab in college – for historic purposes.
Where's Sheldon?
Hi Fran I used to program the IBM 1130 in Fortran in Poet Morsbey.
We had disk, cards, papervtape and a printer. At the end of each run we backed up the data
by punching it onto cards. One day we got a new super fast paper tape reader that would not read the tape.
It was a infaread reader and the tape was red!
The computing hardware built for the Apollo program has always been grossly misunderstood. You simply cannot compare it to your Casio watch or a notebook computer. "Purpose built" is the operative phrase. These computers were built to execute specific tasks in a specific sequence with precise timing, and with a highly critical decision tree. That's why their capacity was measured in "words" rather than Gigabytes. Sorry for the rant, I have a deep respect for both the sacrifices and the results of the people that served the program, its objectives and our country.
Fran you're the best, very cool – loved your answer when comparing power in an iPhone by comparison. You gave it with a defensive pride that only another egg-head would understand 🙂
Gotta get my checklist out… i've got the ti99/4a (my first computer)
I've got the Briel Altair 8800 micro
(Wish i had a real Altair…)
Have the STG Elf 2000 that was on the table next to the VIP…
Fran how do you know so much about legacy computers lol, I am completely amazed with your knowledge of everything tech. I thought I was a geek until I came across your channel. Love it 🙂
Brings back memories of working on the RT-11 systems! Thanks Fran!
Whelp here is a Question for you Fran,,What would you do for a IMSAI two two 8-inch floppy drives..??..
I would have loved to been there! I would have came home with one of those TI-99