Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Longtime followers of [Ken Shirriff’s] work are accustomed to say asking “Where does he get such wonderful toys?”. This time around he’s laid bare the guidance computer from a Titan missile. To be specific, this is the computer that would have been found in the Titan II, an intercontinental ballistic missile that you may remember as a key part of the plot of the classic film WarGames. Yeah, those siloed nukes.
But it’s not the logic that’s mind-blowing, it’s the memory. Those dark rectangles on almost every board in the image at the top of the article are impressively-dense patches of magnetic core memory. That fanout is one of two core memory modules that are found in this computer. With twelve plates per module (each hosting two bits) plus a parity bit on an additional plate, words were composed of 25-bits and the computer’s two memory modules could store a total of 16k words.
Inside a Titan missile guidance computer
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II nuclear missile towards its target or send a Titan IIIC rocket into the proper orbit. The computer worked in conjunction with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a system of gyroscopes and accelerometers that tracked the rocket's position and velocity.
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Ken Shirriff has carefully disassembled an ATX PC power supply and blogged about his findings.
Have you ever wondered what's inside your computer's power supply? The task of a PC power supply is to convert the power from the wall (120 or 240 volts AC) into stable power at the DC voltages that the computer requires. The power supply must be compact and low-cost while transforming the power efficiently and safely. To achieve these goals, power supplies use a variety of techniques and are more complex inside than you might expect. In this blog post, I tear down a PC power supply and explain how it works.1
The power supply I examined, like most modern power supplies uses a design known as a "switching power supply." Switching power supplies are now very cheap, but this wasn't always the case. In the 1950s, switching power supplies were complex and expensive, used in aerospace and satellite applications that needed small, lightweight power supplies. By the early 1970s, though, new high-voltage transistors and other technology improvements made switching power supplies much cheaper and they became widely used in computers. Now, you can buy a phone charger for a few dollars that contains a switching power supply.
He goes through the input filtering, rectification, isolation boundary, splitting of DC, and other aspects including the standby mode circuits. He has written before about various power supplies and chargers before, including a historical overview in IEEE Spectrum.
Previously:
Ken Shirriff Unfolds A Nuclear Missile Guidance Computer With Impressive Memory
How "Special Register Groups" Invaded Computer Dictionaries for Decades
Mature Mainframe Prints Mandlebrot Fractal in 12 Minutes.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @11:53PM (1 child)
One of my colleagues was a former air force officer stationed at a nuclear missile silo.
The standing order was, he told us, if you ever encounter someone walking around by himself, you shoot him on sight. Nobody is to walk around solo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @04:55AM
"Would you like to see the ruins my friend?"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mendax on Thursday March 26 2020, @06:15AM (2 children)
I love reading about these old computers, especially these old "embedded" Defense Department computers. They are a reminder of just how clever our fathers and grandfathers were in a time of limited technology. They're also a reminder of just how far we've come in computer technology over the last sixty years.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @10:38PM (1 child)
And mothers and grandmothers, yo.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday March 27 2020, @03:13AM
Uh, yeah. I forgot about the token woman on the Fortran language development team for IBM and Grace Hopper, also known as Grandma COBOL.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.