ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Reality of Apollo => Topic started by: Zakalwe on March 01, 2017, 04:33:49 AM
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I've not seen this before. It's an excellent series by a guy who has acquired the core rope memory modules from AS-202. Amazingly, the memory cores were retrieved from a rubbish dump.
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More info:
http://www.fin24.com/Tech/News/tshwane-geek-tracks-down-first-apollo-computer-20160902
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That is so cool! BZ, and give that man a medal!
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Neat. My friend Hunchbacked insisted several years ago that core rope couldn't possibly work. Obviously this guy must be a NASA plant...
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Neat. My friend Hunchbacked insisted several years ago that core rope couldn't possibly work. Obviously this guy must be a NASA plant...
You've gotta hand it to those NASA hoaxers. The thinking that went into creating a hoax micro-computer that the public would never have seen, then disposing of it in a scrap metal skip, arranging to have it found, stored for years, then putting a plant in South Africa to get his hands on the hoax memory modules and create a system (using technology that wasn't even dreamt of in the 19t60s) to read the hoax control programs that were lying in the hoax memory modules. Such sophistication! Such planning!
Hell, it'd almost be easier to have just gone to the Moon! ::)
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Neat. My friend Hunchbacked insisted several years ago that core rope couldn't possibly work. Obviously this guy must be a NASA plant...
I remember that video, I didn't/don't understand the workings of the core rope memory, but I gave the guys from MIT and NASA the benefit of doubt that it did indeed work exactly as they programmed it. Seeing the programs stacked up beside the woman was awesome. I remember all those computer paper print outs from college early career. :)
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Core rope is long obsolete, and I hadn't even heard of it prior to studying Apollo. In contrast, read-write "Core" was very common in the computers I used in the 1970s.
So when Hunchbacked started dissing core rope, that gave me a chance to study and understand how it worked. It was actually a very clever design, using what you might call "magnetic logic" to decode the address bits.
Wires carrying the address bits and their logical complements were threaded through the cores in such a way that for any input, exactly one core did not have at least one energized address wire. The rest were all driven into magnetic saturation, blocking the coupling of a readout pulse to the sense wire. Only the addressed core, which remained unsaturated, could perform this coupling.
Starting in the mid-late 1970s there were medium-scale-integrated circuits that were custom made for address decoding, but they didn't exist in the 1960s. If the AGC designers had had to build a address decoder from the standard dual 3-input NOR gates used in the rest of the AGC, I figured they would have needed thousands of packages. The entire computer had only several thousand.
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Now I am thinking of the rotating magnetic drum memory on our old Synthetic Navigation Trainer.....
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Drums were common in those days too, especially as first-level backing stores in virtual memory systems. But Apollo needed smaller size, less power and greater reliability that ruled out things that spun. Also, spinning things have angular momentum that can present problems in a spacecraft unless you carefully arrange them in pairs to cancel.