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A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained

187 points| mcrute | 5 years ago |righto.com

14 comments

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tectonic|5 years ago

This reminds me of this short piece about debugging a live Saturn V (http://www.zamiang.com/post/debugging-a-live-saturn-v), and also a detailed video about the Saturn V's Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mMK6iSZsAs) — it had 112 KB of dual-redundant hand-woven magnetic core memory.

(Links borrowed from my weekly newsletter about the space industry called Orbital Index https://orbitalindex.com — check it out if you like this kind of nerdery.)

grecy|5 years ago

> it had 112 KB of dual-redundant hand-woven magnetic core memory.

Purely out of curiosity, do we know the amount of memory a modern orbital rocket like the Falcon 9 has?

Diederich|5 years ago

> This reminds me of this short piece about debugging a live Saturn V

Fantastic link, thank you for sharing.

cpascal|5 years ago

My new favorite YouTuber, CuriousMarc, has a whole series of videos about restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).

His AGC Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb...

His channel is full of fascinating retro-computing and EE videos.

kens|5 years ago

Just to keep everything straight, the AGC that we restored is a totally different computer from the LVDC/LVDA that this board is from. The AGCs were on the Command Module and the Lunar Module that went to the Moon's surface, while the LVDC was onboard the Saturn V rocket.

The AGC was one of the very first computers to use integrated circuits, while the LVDC used hybrid modules. The LVDC used triple-redundant circuits with voting while the AGC was not redundant. The LVDC was a 26-bit serial computer, while the AGC was a 15-bit computer. The LVDC was built by IBM, while the AGC was built by MIT and Raytheon.

It's interesting that the two computers were different in so many ways.

TheDesolate0|5 years ago

the audio is often so bad tho, I can't understand what they are saying half the time.