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Minutemen I Missile Guidance Computer
Created by Edward N Hall in tandem with the Air Force, the Minuteman I missile’s computer needed to be light weight and fast, two things that computers in the 1960s generally weren’t. It also needed to be able to withstand the impressive force of a missile launch. They landed on a D-17B computer, which weighed around 62 lbs. This machine could not only calculate its position in the air continuously throughout its flight, but also was built to be protected from moisture and vibration. -
John F Kennedy's Challenge
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” John F Kennedy, addressing Rice University in Texas regarding the Nation’s Space Effort -
IBM System/360
A mainframe computer system family created by IBM with a wide range of price points. The various models were geared towards commercial and scientific applications. The slowest of the bunch, Model 30, could execute 34,500 instructions in one second, and had memory as high as 64 KB. NASA's space program utilized the Model 91. It could perform up to a whopping 16.6 million instructions per second, making it the most powerful user-operated computer at the time. -
Olivetti Programma 101
During the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Italian company Olivetti S.p.A. announced the creation of the Programma 101. The following year, this calculator went on sale. It was programmable, had a printer, and could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and calculate square roots. Ten were sold to NASA for use on the Apollo space program. -
Star Trek Begins Airing
Gene Roddenberry’s show about a starship of scientists and explorers was a perfect encapsulation of the space craze, including a lot of predictive future technology that left a large impact on computers and scientists for many years to come. Star Trek also had the added bonus of incorporating many marginalized people in its cast, a marvel during the civil rights movement of the 60s. -
Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)
The original computer to be utilized by the Apollo spacecraft was the size of seven side by side refrigerators. MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory worked many years to condense the computer’s size. The result was the Apollo Guidance Computer. Weighing only 70 pounds and less than 1 cubic foot, it read commands from astronauts through two digit codes. It is also one of the first uses of integrated circuits, and utilized core memory. The AGC’s first flight was with Apollo 7. -
Read-Only Rope Memory
Apollo 11 would truly put the Guidance Computer to the test by attempting to land on the lunar surface. With this in mind, NASA and MIT introduced the read-only rope memory. The rope maintained the compactness of the AGC, and held around 72 KB of storage. Rope running through a circular core read as a binary one, and rope circumventing the core read as binary zero. It was costly and labor intensive, thanks to textile workers having to weave a program into rope memory by hand. -
Apollo 11 Lands on the Moon
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”
-Neil Armstrong to over 650 million people tuning in to see him take the first steps on the lunar surface