July 14, 2009

Build Your Own Apollo 11 Landing Computer

Written by Nancy Atkinson

I'm classifying this one under "Extreme Geek." But very cool Extreme Geek.

Remember the computer on the Apollo 11 Eagle lander that kept reporting "1201" and "1202" alarms as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached landing on the Moon? Well, now you can have one of your very own. Software engineer John Pultorak worked 4 years to build a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), just so he could have one. And then he wrote a complete manual and put it online so that anyone else with similar aspirations wouldn't have to go through the same painstaking research as he did. The manual is available free, but Pultorak says he spent about $3,000 for the hardware.

The 1,000 page documentation includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer. You can find them all posted on Galaxiki, downloadable in pdf. format (the files are large).

Web site URL here:

http://www.galaxiki.org/web/main/_blog/all/build-your-own-nasa-apollo-landing-computer-no-kidding.shtml

Full UT article here:

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/14/build-your-own-apollo-11-landing-computer/

To quote, just to appreciate how far we have come with computing
power in the last four decades:

"The original Apollo AGC cost over $150,000. It didn't have a disk drive to store any software, and only 74 kilobytes of memory that had been literally hard-wired, and all of 4 Kb of something that is sort of like RAM."