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It's not often that a YouTube video on a technical topic gives one goosebumps. And it's not often that someone unpacking a computer makes history.
Francois Rautenbach a computer hardware and software engineer from South Africa achieves both with a series of videos he has quietly posted on YouTube.
It shows the "unboxing" of a batch of computer modules that had been found in a pile of scrap metal 40 years ago and kept in storage ever since. Painstaking gathering of a wide range of evidence from documents to archived films had convinced Rautenbach he had tracked down the very first Guidance and Navigation Control computer used on a test flight of the Saturn 1B rocket and the Apollo Command and Service Modules.
Apollo-Saturn 202 or Flight AS-202 as it was officially called was the first to use an onboard computer – the same model that would eventually take Apollo 11 to the moon. Rautenbach argues that the computer on AS-202 was also the world's first microcomputer. That title has been claimed for several computers made in later years from the Datapoint 2200 built by CTC in 1970 to the Altair 8800 designed in 1974.
The AS-202 flight computer goes back to the middle of the previous decade.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2016/09/01/How-a-Tshwane-engineer-stumbled-upon-a-great-treasure-of-the-computer-age
https://youtu.be/WquhaobDqLU
https://youtu.be/OkFy30kxfh4
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Saturday September 03 2016, @04:47PM
I disagree. It is a piece of computer history that was a milestone for the time. The technology was not always advanced, but they did stretch the possible with the nor-gate based computer in terms of size, performance and power consumption. Let alone the software... Surely, it does not compare anyway with the computer you have in your pocket, but you cannot deny the historical importance of this piece of hardware. It is always nice to see some details of the technology of the time.