The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer - Brian Troutwine
Erlang Solutions2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2015–2019
talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2015–2019 on HN
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.
Recommended as a wonderful overview of the AGC architecture, though one commenter found it uninspiring.
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4 comments from Hacker News
"The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer" is a wonderful talk: ▶ this video The AGC implemented a virtual machine to run higher-level computational routines. The whole architecture is really interesting.
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: ▶ this video link
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). ▶ this video
A not so inspiring talk about a very inspiring topic. A much better talk about the Apollo guidance computer was held at Code Mesh London 2015: ▶ this video