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The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer - Brian Troutwine

Erlang Solutions · 169.9K views · 2015-11-06 · 48:36

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Overview

Brian Troutwine's Code Mesh 2015 talk on the Apollo Guidance Computer. It covers the AGC's design, core rope memory, its interrupt and software behavior, and the pioneering engineering effort behind it.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a wonderful overview of the AGC architecture, though one commenter found it uninspiring.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2019

Topics

History of computingSpace exploration & spaceflightComputer architecture & CPUs
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apolloagccore rope memoryspace computing

What people said

EvanAnderson · 2019-07 · Strong recommendation

"The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer" is a wonderful talk: [VIDEO] The AGC implemented a virtual machine to run higher-level computational routines. The whole architecture is really interesting.

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shawnps · 2015-11 · Recommendation

The part about core rope memory was pretty interesting. Star charts and other bits of data were actually woven into a form of read-only memory via loom: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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EvanAnderson · 2015-11 · Recommendation

I was going to say much of the same, but I won't echo you. I just recently watched this really interesting video from London Code Mesh 2015 on the Apollo Guidance Computer where the radar antenna-generated interrupts were discussed (among other interesting bugs). [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Erlang Solutions, played through YouTube.

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