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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @08:05PM
While poking about in a library once, I stumbled upon an article in a data processing magazine from 1964 that used the word "microcomputer" to refer to the flight computer on a Minuteman missile.
Don't remember which magazine, sorry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Guidance [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @04:17AM
Military and aerospace were the biggest customers of early integrated circuits. Without them, it may have taken much longer for the single-chip microprocessor to be produced.