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: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Saturday September 03 2016, @04:48PM
It really is amazing how far we've come in 50 years.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 03 2016, @05:51PM
It's also really amazing how far we've retreated in 50 years... from lunar landings to LEO.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday September 03 2016, @06:03PM
You are referring to manned spaceflight, of course.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 03 2016, @11:09PM
When I was in kindergarten (1972), the question was: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Male answers were split more or less evenly between police/fireman and astronaut. There was no category for "assembly technician in a clean room that builds little remote controlled vehicles to send on multi-year missions," or any of the thousands of other support roles that make interplanetary probes possible.
Pioneer 8 and Mariner 5 were already launched by 1967... we've gotten better at them, taken a few farther, but unmanned probes were already "a thing" 50 years ago.
I'm not saying we should divert unmanned exploration in favor of manned. However, I would go so far as to say that we might give up one, just one, aircraft carrier group and divert those funds to a heavy lift space program that includes manned missions and lunar/martian/asteroid colonization.
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(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday September 03 2016, @11:51PM
Sounds good to me : )
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 03 2016, @06:51PM
Building on what Tibman said, we have the Voyager probes going interstellar, and New Horizons has zipped past Pluto and is heading for 2014 MU69, which will be 43.4 AU away from the Sun. We've also orbited and landed on a comet. The "sky crane" used to land Curiosity on Mars could be used for future landers [wikipedia.org].
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