18 posted 2 years ago by pkvi 2 years ago by pkvi +19 / -1 29 comments share 29 comments share save hide report block hide replies
During the Vietnam conflict they had pretty good inertial guidance systems.
I had a uncle that flew a fighter. He said you could do a dogfight and it would stay pretty accurate.
I personally saw the Apollo 17 night launch from 5 miles away. A Saturn V launch is jaw dropping.
The control system for the lunar landing is what I have a hard time believing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndvmFlg1WmE
Looks like the computer had 36 banks of 1kilowords ea. fixed memory and 2kilowords rewritable memory. All in assembly.
The tightest code I have ever seen is a chess playing game in 4k.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y37tXoBDx0
Many years ago I help port a 2D version of Space War to a Z-80 processor
I think we had 16 kilobytes to play with.
It was played on an oscilloscope.
A lot of it was fixed code -- like the gravity tables (no real time floating point math)
So that is roughly in the ballpark of NASA.
NASA got started with Germans.