Anniversary of an amazingly enduring design

Iggy, you have GOT to get your mind out of that gutter. It will ruin your life!

Point taken.

Most of the current computer tech. was driven by the oil, automotive and commercial/military aircraft industries not to mention your friendly weatherman.

Were Obama to decide to fund a Mars mission, Orly Taitz, Michelle Bachman, and Sarah Palin would be asking the Martian's to produce Obama's birth certificate. Either that or they'd just be claiming he was a Martian.

LOL

And that is the truth. I know a guy that was a draftsman when they were designing the recovery parachute for the space shuttle boosters. I told him about Kevlar which was new at the time. When he suggested that they consider kevlar for part of the recovery parachute, they refused to consider it because there was no mil spec for kevlar at the time.

The launch computers for the Apollo program were RCA 110A's. Developed by RCA for controlling oil well drilling rigs but modified by adding more memory.

=20 Dan

" snipped-for-privacy@krl.org" fired this volley in news:72f9470e- snipped-for-privacy@e7g2000yqf.googlegroups.com:

I OWNED the last launch control computer for the Apollo program. It was a Systems Engineering Labs 840A (SEL-840).

Cost me $400 at auction, and a 27-foot UHaul JH to move it. (filled the truck, too!)

LLoyd

If Obama were to back a Mars mission, and still can't produce a valid US birth certificate, the only logical conclusion would be he's "The Man Who Fell to Earth."

"Systems Engineering Laboratories was founded in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in

That's from Wiki.

"John R. Carroll" fired this volley in news:gYednfo9vuQInSPWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

Hmmm... that's odd. I bought it at the cape at an auction. It was specifically listed as "Apollo launch control 'system'".

I can assure you it wasn't a data-acquisition system. It really was a full-up computer.

LLoyd

"John R. Carroll" fired this volley in news:JIudnQ7zIL6SiCPWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

It was. It had experienced a "power supply catastrophe", which in NASA parlance is, "it got smoked".

A friend and I got it working, learning a HELL of a lot in the practice, then sold it off for gold (70u plating on ALL 200K+ pins!!) and over 3 tons of aluminum. Traded off the working tape drives for other "cool toys" of the time.

LLoyd

Regulations my ass. In the present state of disfunction, if the current president proposed it, the Republicans would do everything in their power to block it, and if the last president had proposed it, the Democrats would do everything in their power to block it. The country can't get sh*t done because blocking the other side has become more important than doing anything useful, to both sides, and any third side remains too small to do anything useful.

And Nth to the "without the moon program (or more properly, 60's aerospace in general) most of the toys that make things faster/easier today would not exist." The Air Force & DARPA (or some DARPA ancestor) had a huge amount to do with the development of CNC machining, from what I have read. Much more to make airfoils/spars than spacecraft.

You probably got the whole mess from all of the suppliers. Cool toy!

"John R. Carroll" fired this volley in news:pOydnbWZ0bFx3yPWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

All wire-wrap. Big 0.15 x .032 pins, too. Not the .025 Augat style.

LLoyd

Long, long ago I worked for EAI, a manufacturer of analog/hybrid simulation computers. EAI was one of SEL's best customers (many EAI computers used SELs for the digital piece). I can state that EAI shipped many computers to NASA, and some of those computers contained SEL machines. A SEL 32/55 was in the first computer (that I am aware of) sold to China by a US company. It was a dual console 7800 system, similar to the moon landing simulator. As a DoS condition of the sale, we had to use an obsolete digital (the 32/55) and lengthen the access times on the hard disks. The computer was sold for "design of electric motors and agricultural purposes". It was delivered to Harbin, next to the air base.

Kevin Gallimore

Ecnerwal wrote: >

Yeah, that constitutional thing about "checks and balances" is a bitch, ain't it?

Comrade technomaNge

And how many machines still can read the punched cards today? They were being phased out of computer centers twenty or more years ago.

Same problem with a lot of tape formats.

Enjoy, DoN.

Having worked for an Army R&D lab for many years, I have seen many computers described as "data acquisition controllers" and other similar things when if you called it a "computer", you would have to go through reams of extra documentation and justification -- and *still* might not get it.

IIRC -- there was even an IBM 360 acquired under some masking nomenclature.

NASA was government, and probably had to deal with similar problems. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

"DoN. Nichols" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@Katana.d-and-d.com:

It was explained to the plaintif's lawyer that we had changed computer systems during the period between the time of the meeting and the time that the litigation was concerned with and that we had no way to read - much less reload - the programming and data that they sought although the System Save tapes were still in storage as mandated by state law.

Frustrated, the plaintif's lawyer asked why we still preserved the tapes even though our current system couldn't use them. My response was "The Law says that we have to keep them but doesn't say that we have to be able to read them."

The defense's lawyer cracked up and the plaintif's lawyer stormed out.

o9vuQInSPWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

I have no doubt that it was a full up computer. And can easily believe it was sold as an " Apollo launch control ' system ' ". But the RCA 110A computers were the launch computers. They had no integrated circuits and were bigger at least physically. They were also 24 bit machines. As I recall they had 8 banks of 8K words.

Dan