![]() ![]() It had to control a 13,000 kg spaceship, orbiting at 3,500 kilometers per hour around the moon, land it safely within meters of a specified location and guide it back from the surface to rendezvous with a command ship in lunar orbit. The system had to minimize fuel consumption because the spacecraft only contained enough fuel for one landing attempt. 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. It was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it a pretty amazing piece of hardware in the 1960s, as it was the first computer to use integrated circuits. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”) an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.Įach Apollo mission featured two AGC computers – one in the Apollo Command Module and one in the Apollo Lunar Module. Reportedly, Aldrin later said he kept the guidance system on while the descent radar was also on. The computer wasn’t designed for that amount of simultaneous input from both systems, which was why the alarms kept going off. But Aldrin’s reasoning was if the descent had to be aborted he didn’t want to have to turn on the guidance while they were doing their abort rocket burn to escape from crashing. As the story goes, while the alarms were going off, computer engineer Jack Garman told guidance officer Steve Bales in mission control it was safe to continue the descent and this was relayed to the crew. Garman remembered the 12 alarms occurring during one of the hundreds of simulations the team performed in preparation of the Apollo 11 mission, and knew it would be OK to continue. And now you can build yourself a little piece of it. ![]() Hi Nancy, Please tell John Pultorak that I was the engineer who wrote all of the diagnostic programs for the Eagle Lunar Lander computer. The DSKY gave me a fit because the limited number of keys available on the keyboard. The key were huge as they were designed to be used by astronauts wearing those supersized space suite gloves. So I had to create multifunction key designations to facilitate selection from the large software diag library of the required fault isolation programs. We called the modules in the Eagle computer “cordwood” as the interconnection busses were welded together to stand up to the expected vibration. I paid $20 for baby type and have been pleased with it so with the right tweaks I think a lot of parents would happily buy this app for $1.99 or even a little more.I worked for Raytheon at the time and had to final test my suite of diags on the Lander Simulator at the AC Spark Plug plant at Milwakee Wisconsin. That would make this app 5 stars and worth the purchase price and more. Either to make the Command combinations take a few seconds to make sure it's deliberate and also disable gestures and function keys at the top so that you don't accidentally end up on another screen. There needs to be a way to have it worry-free. Either way, I find myself intervening frequently to get the screen off the desktop, the preferences menu, the dock, etc. But even still- many of the top keys on the keyboard have a function and the mouse gestures will pull up the desktop. Unfortuantely the Command plus another key combo does happen on accident. All keys can be pushed, and none of them do anything. So baby type the mouse isn't baby proofed but the keyboard is. I like that because my son LOVES to hear the kitty cat meow but it's so hard to get it to do any one sound so I find myself hitting keys a bunch to try to get it to play the cat again.Īnother thing I mentioned before is the lack of baby proofness. So "C" would be "C" or a cat that meow's. One hting about baby type I like is that the keys are consistently one value sound, but there are multiple values for each key. Anyway, the idea is to be able to let the kid go nuts on your keyboard or with the mouse and not have to worry, but this isn't quite baby proofed. ![]() It is similar to a window's based program that I love (that was quite a bit more) called Baby Type. ![]()
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