1960's Saturn V Computer Marvel

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Probably nothing new to computer nerds, but my friend showed me how the computers that operated the 1960's Saturn V rockets were made and operated. Hand held calculators (Bomar Brain +,-, X, '/.) became available to the public in the early 1970's.

Mind boggling. I hope that anyone that has the patience to watch this 14 minute video enjoys this. There is a longer version too.

 
That channel is really neat. It's crazy to think that the cell phone your holding is thousands of times more powerful
 
Probably nothing new to computer nerds, but my friend showed me how the computers that operated the 1960's Saturn V rockets were made and operated. Hand held calculators (Bomar Brain +,-, X, '/.) became available to the public in the early 1970's.

Mind boggling. I hope that anyone that has the patience to watch this 14 minute video enjoys this. There is a longer version too.


My engineering class graduated in 1971. In the last year one guy showed up with a scientific calculator. I seem to recall him saying he paid $300 for it.

My first job as an engineer (with the highest pay of anyone in my class, at the time of graduation) was $9900/year which is $825/month. So a pretty expensive calculator.
 
makes you wonder how much storage and computing power is wasted in just making stuff look pretty on screen, and with it energy and resources.

It's actually amazing how much computing power there is that runs off a single ~2100 mAh 3.7V battery. But then I think of this:




Great Scott! It's a tiny supercomputer. This must allow astrophysicists to triangulate complex equations in real time.

Yeah - I guess it could probably do that, but mainly we use it to send little smiley faces to each other. Pictures of eggplants. That sort of thing. So it's not really what we use it for.
 
It's actually amazing how much computing power there is that runs off a single ~2100 mAh 3.7V battery. But then I think of this:
But life-critical systems such as avionics run off things that are much less powerful. The Boeing 737NG/Max still run off 286s. The original Motorola 68k RISC architecture that powered the original Mac(as well the Power Mac’s PowerPC RISC architecture) is powering countless cars, HVAC systems and many devices dependent on an microcontroller(or is it IoT these days?).
 
But life-critical systems such as avionics run off things that are much less powerful. The Boeing 737NG/Max still run off 286s. The original Motorola 68k RISC architecture that powered the original Mac(as well the Power Mac’s PowerPC RISC architecture) is powering countless cars, HVAC systems and many devices dependent on an microcontroller(or is it IoT these days?).

A lot of things don't really need anything all that powerful. I remember hearing about company sending rockets into space. They used an older processor technology, using a military-grade process that was way behind state of the art commercial processes. But it was proven. I think NASA and a lot of defense projects would just hardwire functions rather than run software because it was so much more efficient, even though it was expensive as heck compared to writing software to run on a processor. And it required a respin if there was a problem.

As far as microcontrollers go, I think embedded versions of the 8051 are still in use in all sorts of electronics. Quite a few things are fairly simple and don't require power hungry processors.
 
But life-critical systems such as avionics run off things that are much less powerful. The Boeing 737NG/Max still run off 286s. The original Motorola 68k RISC architecture that powered the original Mac(as well the Power Mac’s PowerPC RISC architecture) is powering countless cars, HVAC systems and many devices dependent on an microcontroller(or is it IoT these days?).

The most recent Mars rover and I think a few other satellites and probes run on PowerPC RAD750 CPUs, a special radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC 750 CPU. If you're a Mac user, you know the 750 better as the "G3", which was in the original colorful iMacs and iBooks(and a handful of other computers). Apple started using it in 1997 and I think the last computers with it, the last generation iBook G3s, were made in 2001 or 2002. For age context, when Apple started shipping it they would compare it side-by-side with the Pentium II.

In 2021, a G3 is essentially useless on the web. I've not tried in the last few months, but the last time I did even in a relatively "hot" system using the most up to date browser available(TenFourFox), it falls over and dies rendering anything with Javascript or really going much heavier than primarily text sites.

At the same time, though, we trust that CPU to run spacecraft, and it does a darn good job at it.
 
The Texas Instruments MSP-430 microcontrollers use the same 16 bit architecture and even instruction set, as the PDP-11 microcomputer from now defunct Digital Equipment Corporation. Newer RISC-V Bumblebee core MCUs like the GD32VF103CBT6 are amazing in their speed, capabilities and low power usage.
 
The most recent Mars rover and I think a few other satellites and probes run on PowerPC RAD750 CPUs, a special radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC 750 CPU. If you're a Mac user, you know the 750 better as the "G3", which was in the original colorful iMacs and iBooks(and a handful of other computers). Apple started using it in 1997 and I think the last computers with it, the last generation iBook G3s, were made in 2001 or 2002. For age context, when Apple started shipping it they would compare it side-by-side with the Pentium II.

In 2021, a G3 is essentially useless on the web. I've not tried in the last few months, but the last time I did even in a relatively "hot" system using the most up to date browser available(TenFourFox), it falls over and dies rendering anything with Javascript or really going much heavier than primarily text sites.

At the same time, though, we trust that CPU to run spacecraft, and it does a darn good job at it.
That indigo blue iMac g3 was the absolute bane of my existence when I was younger lol!
 
makes you wonder how much storage and computing power is wasted in just making stuff look pretty on screen, and with it energy and resources.
Truer than you realize. Some new and very expensive gaming computers cannot legally be sold in certain West Coast states including California because of energy demand. Those states have phased in laws about maximum energy draw from such devices. But look at what is affected: not computers used in business or science, but those for playing the latest video games. As if we needed those.

One estimate is that gaming platforms in the US use more energy than the entire state of West Virginia. This is almost as bad as bitcoin mining. Think about the sheer power and capability of today's computers, compare that with what those old spacecraft systems were expected to do with much less, and boggle at the idea of using today's powerful machines just to play games at a huge energy cost.

Looking at what the Saturn V system could do reminds me of the early home computers such as Commodore, Spectrum, etc. Many of those were Z80–based and had a 64K RAM limit, yet crude spreadsheet and word processing programs appeared for them and they worked.

Excel and Word operate in much the same way as those long-ago programs, but even accounting for the data storage capabilities, today's versions use far more memory and CPU time than you'd expect. Having cheap memory encourages sloppy programming that uses excessive space and processing.
 
Yes, just look how a few years old computer system seems to bog down running newer software. Even simple stuff like surfing the web.

Scrolling up I see bunnspecial made the same comment.
 
As an Instrument Tech, I found pneumatic 'math blocks' assembled for critical boiler functions.
These had 'started' as hydraulic blocks near say 1900 - went to air for leak safety.
Fixed working pressure in, variable pressure as input, various passages sized (psi, square inches of area) to add, subtract, multiply, divide, square root - other operands brought in through additional ports - result out to operate device.
Literally, physical computation machines.

On a modern note...
I am still amazed that a program or web site can show me a list of numbers and I have to get (fetch or open) a calculator to add them up. Shouldn't that be a OS thing by now? (Highlighted numbers in a list get added - doh!)
 
I'd wanted to post this last night, but was also sort of in a hurry and didn't search for it.

Several years ago, some really smart guys got their hands on a guidance computer(I think out of a LEM that never flew, but IIRC the CM and LEM computers were the same). They spent days working intently on it and managed to get it powered on and running the original software.

The way this stuff was acomplished was amazing, but some of the technology to make it work(like the corded memory) is-in practical terms-odd enough and obscure enough that even some computing/electronics geniuses can struggle with it.

Also, it's entirely soldered discrete components, which makes repair easy in a sense, but also means that you have huge numbers of solder joints and other places that can cause endless headaches 50+ years after the fact.
That indigo blue iMac g3 was the absolute bane of my existence when I was younger lol!

The later iMacs had their ups and downs. Steve Jobs was obsessed with passive/silent cooling almost to the detriment of systems. The original Macintosh models cooked analog boards like crazy, and things like the Kensington System Saver(which is a fan that latches into the handle on top and blows air through the top vents) were popular. The Cube was another a little later than the iMac, and all of mine(all 5 of them) I've retrofitted with base fans to keep the temperatures down and keep the power boards from cooking. The engineers knew the Cube had a cooling issue and even snuck an unused fan bracket into the base of it.

The first gen(tray loading) iMac G3s did have fans, but the slot-loading models(which I'm assuming your Indigo was-the tray loaders came in Bondi Blue, Grape, Tangerine, Lime, Strawberry, and Blueberry) had them. I have an Indigo that I think is 500mhz. My Indigo runs well, but one of the big issues too was that Mac OS 9 was an absolute mess of an operating system. No one person understood it top-to-bottom. The 68K emulator was integrated deep into the OS, which made it seamless but there were also low-level system processes that were still 68K and functioned on the emulator. Add things like cooperative multi-tasking and non-protected memory and you have a recipe for disaster. OS X runs a lot more stably on them, but these days it's hard to use anything older than 10.4.11 while IMO the iMac G3s run best with nothing newer than 10.2.8.
 
The most recent Mars rover and I think a few other satellites and probes run on PowerPC RAD750 CPUs, a special radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC 750 CPU. If you're a Mac user, you know the 750 better as the "G3", which was in the original colorful iMacs and iBooks(and a handful of other computers). Apple started using it in 1997 and I think the last computers with it, the last generation iBook G3s, were made in 2001 or 2002. For age context, when Apple started shipping it they would compare it side-by-side with the Pentium II.

In 2021, a G3 is essentially useless on the web. I've not tried in the last few months, but the last time I did even in a relatively "hot" system using the most up to date browser available(TenFourFox), it falls over and dies rendering anything with Javascript or really going much heavier than primarily text sites.

At the same time, though, we trust that CPU to run spacecraft, and it does a darn good job at it.
I remember those - I was in high school when the iMac G3 came out and Steve Jobs was back at Apple. The PowerPC still lives on for industrial control, networking and automotive applications and it does a fine job - Freescale(NXP) still makes them. The Japanese OEMs have used MCUs with linkages to gaming consoles. I think Denso uses the same Hitachi Super-H core as a Sega Genesis/Saturn/Dreamcast in Toyota’s PCMs.
 
Truer than you realize. Some new and very expensive gaming computers cannot legally be sold in certain West Coast states including California because of energy demand. Those states have phased in laws about maximum energy draw from such devices. But look at what is affected: not computers used in business or science, but those for playing the latest video games. As if we needed those.
I can order a “workstation-class” PC with similar GPU power as a gaming computer from Dell/HP/Lenovo or from CDW and not get any roadblocks.

The future for the enterprise is VDI - Amazon/Microsoft/Google have the compute resources in AWS/Azure/GCP and companies win by sending their employees lesser-spec laptops or BYOD. Maintenance, support and software licenses are included in your SLA. Of course, more money to Amazon or Microsoft.
 
Truer than you realize. Some new and very expensive gaming computers cannot legally be sold in certain West Coast states including California because of energy demand. Those states have phased in laws about maximum energy draw from such devices. But look at what is affected: not computers used in business or science, but those for playing the latest video games. As if we needed those.
I don't believe they limit the maximum power it can use while it's on, it's that the standby power when it's off has to be extremely low.
 
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