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To: BobL; poinq
They did have computers, but primitive as hell, and it took super-human skills to squeeze the code to fit the tiny memory.

Yes. Their computers were extremely rudimentary but mostly worked.

Remember, when the Eagle was landing Armstrong and Aldrin kept calling out a certain number over and over. It was the computer buffer overload code so Armstrong took over and manually flew the Eagle to touchdown. Because of the terrain they had only a few seconds of fuel left to burn at touchdown and that is why Mission Control said they had a lot of people breathing again.

57 posted on 11/29/2022 9:47:27 PM PST by OldMissileer (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, PK. Winners of the Cold War)
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To: OldMissileer

Well they weren’t running a Windows program, or it would have “crashed”, there was an error in the checklist, a switch in the wrong position, that confused the radar system or somesuch, that’s why the 1202 errors.

But the system just prioritized and kept on keeping on. We can talk about how primitive the hardware was, but the computer code they wrote to run was pretty tight. This was done under contract by MIT, at the Draper laboratory. Charles Draper was one of those once in a lifetime kind of special geniuses, he’d cut his teeth on sophisticated wartime aircraft navigational instruments so he was a natural to get heavily involved in Apollo.

Parts of the software program were actually hard wired into the spacecraft itself, as “core memory”, custom tailored and specifically wired for each unique mission. Tiny wire loops around an iron core, bazillions of them, each representing bits and bytes, 1s and 0s, made by the nice ladies at Raytheon or wherever. There’s a pretty good YouTube video transcription of period NASA films showing the process, it was amazingly labor intensive and time consuming.


62 posted on 11/29/2022 10:13:39 PM PST by Freedom4US
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To: OldMissileer

From what I’ve read in books written by the principal people of that era, the “1202” error was actually a problem of data overload, which caused the onboard computer to miss its processing time targets. Luckily, one of the ground staff had seen the error in simulation tests, and knew what it was and why it was occurring. The cause was determined to be from the radar system’s data, an early case of “TMI” as we now know it. The solution was to turn off the radar, forcing Armstrong to manually fly the lander at the end.

And the countdown you hear on the audio isn’t really how much fuel was actually left, but more the time left until the fuel supply was low enough that an abort and return to the command module would be indicated to avoid Eagle’s being stranded on the moon. The added fuel usage was due to the terrain problem and Armstrong’s need to reposition landing to something better suited. I believe they added more fuel to later flights to be prepared for similar situations.


94 posted on 11/30/2022 8:46:36 AM PST by Ratman0823 ("Failure is not an option"... Unless you are a RINO!)
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