Since then, he’s spent countless hours learning precisely how these machines worked. You had tons and tons of kids looking at Playboys I was reading about guidance computers.” “I open it up, and it had all the technical manuals on Apollo. “At 13 years old, I get a box on Christmas, around two feet on a side, weighed a million pounds,” O’Brien told me. He was interested in computers from an early age, and when one of his dad’s old friends rose up the ranks at NASA, he came into possession of the technical manuals that governed the operation of the computer. O’Brien’s father was a pilot, so Frank became a military brat. To understand how significant the Apollo system was, and why its tiny amount of raw processing power is irrelevant, you only have to listen to the OG computer programmer and volunteer NASA historian Frank O’Brien, who has spent his life lovingly detailing the functions of the Apollo Guidance Computer. Read: What will the moon landing mean to the future? You could not actually guide a spaceship to the moon with a smart doorbell. Of course, any contemporary device has vastly more raw computational ability than the early machine, but the Apollo computer was remarkably capable, reliable, and up to the task it was given. Michio Kaku, the physicist and popular author, put it like this: “Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon.”īut these just-so sayings obscure the real power of the Apollo computer. Now, if you compare the computing power that NASA used with any common device, from a watch to a greeting card to a microwave, it induces technological vertigo. The trends that this computer foretold kept spinning out, exponentially, for decades: From big to small, from vacuum tubes to silicon, from hardware to software. Computers had been the size of rooms and filled with vacuum tubes, and if the Apollo computer, at 70 pounds, was not exactly miniature yet, it began “the transition between people bragging about how big their computers are … and bragging about how small their computers are,” the MIT aerospace and computing historian David Mindell once joked in a lecture. The Apollo Guidance Computer, in both its guises-one on board the core spacecraft, and the other on the lunar module-was a triumph of engineering. The calculations required to make in-flight adjustments and the complexity of the thrust controls outstripped human capacities. A pilot could never have navigated the way to the moon, as if a spaceship were simply a more powerful airplane. Without the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft, there would have been no moon landing, no triumphant first step, no high-water mark for human space travel. Editor's Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.
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