28 Apr
1999
28 Apr
'99
5:48 p.m.
At 09:47 PM 4/28/99 -0700, you wrote:
Ah, Grasshopper... Discresion is one of the first tools of survival!
> I was watching the show on the history of
computers on the Discovery
channel
and they
talked about the computer on the Lunar Module that landed on the
moon. It had 5000 integrated circuits in it and was quite the marvel for
its time. Could this be a candidate for the first Personal Computer? They
were kinda pricey! ;-)
I'm not getting involved this time. Last time I tried, I just make myself
look silly. > Does anybody have any information on that cpu -
word size, instruction set,
> memory, control panel, etc? Who manuafactured it? Where can one go and
see
> it (without going to the moon!) How about the
software for it?
<snippage>
I have the manual on my hard drive, and there might be
a URL.
Please tell!
The first time I saw the AGC (one of them? how many
were there?) it was on
display, but not working, at the Computer Museum in Boston. I don't
remember if they put plastic in front of the keypad... there wouldn't have
been much point in pressing the keys anyway.
The other time I saw the AGC, it was in a cardboard box in the Computer
Museum History Center warehouse in Moffett Field. They had just moved in --
I was poking around -- "What's in THIS box? Oh, it's the PDP-1 broken down
to individual System Modules! And this box is the AGC, and that box..."
Rather awe-inspiring actually.
> An simulator for one would be pretty cool to see, especially if it was
> running the program that they used to land on the moon!
Well... if someone gets a simulator running, I've got a test for it. Here
next to me on the shelf is one of the Apollo 13 flight manuals, and the
sequences for inputting programs into the computer goes on... and on...
and on... B^}
-jim
---
jimw(a)computergarage.org
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