Some viewers asked for a family-friendly summary version of the ongoing restoration saga. Now I don’t have to do it, here it is! Thanks for coming and making yet another superb video.
By "non-family friendly," I assume they're referring to people not being able to keep up without some fluency in hardware-level computing? I do some hardware building with my retro computers (got a few projects in the works), and am no means an expert (it's just my hobby), but I was able to at least follow along through the entire series, so it's not too difficult if you have some basic fluency.
I imagine those Raytheon engineers would be as blown away looking at that connected laptop as we are blown away by their groundbreaking flight computer.
I've been a fan of CuriousMarc's channel for a long while now and I'd rate the AGC restoration as one of their best series yet (Mike is an absolute genius). Also check out the alto restoration, The 70's windows computer that Jobs stole the look and feel for his Mac.
These guys undertook a mission worthy of 1960's NASA itself. It's also heartwarming to see both young and older minds involved in this incredible project.
Scott - this is absolute art. I'm an electrical engineer who graduated in 1974. I was peering very hard at the schematic - many many many flip flops (those are the transistor pairs) and gates! They had to squish what would have been several 8 foot racks into that tiny footprint. I grew up with this technology and tube technology before that. We used core plane RAM for event storage (projects for the Atomic Energy Commission (Now Dept. of Energy)). I remember the first time I saw a transistor! It was germanium and very fragile. - And this team had to trouble shoot, locate, and dig out and replace a defective diode that had been potted? Wow! My bet it was a IN34 diode :-) The first logic chips I designed and worked with were TTL, and we also used Emitter Coupled Logic, (ECL) . I have done a ton of wire wrap prototyping too (those little tools in the holders on the board are wire wrap--de-wrap tools . Thus I can't see for beans any more (nothing to do with my age) LoL. Thank you again Scott! )))HUGG(((
Having attended the US Navy's Basic Electricity and Electronics School and specialized electronics courses relevant to specific hardware in the early 1980s all of this looks very familiar. The digital combat system and all of its supporting computers (AN/UYK-7 or, simply, the "Yuck-7") required robust construction and durable components to meet the demands of a warship in combat conditions, much as the guidance computer of a rocket might require. It's also my understanding that the water effluent from the fuel cells went into the cooling jackets for the guidance computer and, indeed, the Yuck-7 was also water-cooled, with a dedicated refrigeration plant providing chilled-water for the electronics cooling system. Glad you got that experience and felt like sharing..................................
Karl Brundage the same for me working on the AN/AYK-14 Airborne computers which were air cooled. The first ones I worked on had two banks of 64 K Words of core memory. They were tough beasts that had to endure very rough operating conditions.
The equipment built for (and supported by guys and gals like you) for the USN was frighteningly rugged! It had to be! You are right on the water cooling for the AGC unit. I remember reading years ago that this was using water cooling from the fuel cells. I know much of the avionics used in the Shuttle Transport System (STS) was water cooled in the same way.
@@cynthiaklenk6313 One of the stories I tell my nephews is that when we were doing "local ops" around Hawaii we did a training regimen we referred to as "Drilling and Spilling", where we simulated everything from nuclear war to the loss of lube-oil pressure for the main engines. These drills happened between 0600 and 1800, and if you had the mid-watch (from 0000-0600) the night before you were absolutely exhausted. I found that it was completely ridiculous to go to your rack to sleep, as within 15 minutes of falling asleep the general alarm, collision alarm or some other announcement of doom would make you spring from your slumber and into immediate action. Instead, I simply went up to the Sonar Equipment room, where the Yuck-7s were purring along and wedged myself between two of them. The combination of their nice, warm heat and the mini-vibrations of their fans and the ship's motion put me to sleep like a baby in a car seat on the dryer........ Good times..............................
Went through the surface of the moon there though. Numbers on the DSKY I bet no one would be happy to have seen on there back then :D Incredible work, they're legends.
Would you buy a startup DVD based on an actual AGC coded moon landing simulation complete with NASA dialogues? One that could be developed into a full on simulator if you wished to?
Clarification, the stuff that's running on the laptop there emulates diagnostic control panels that would have been used in the lab on the ground during AGC development and testing, as well as the astronauts' UI (DSKY), and they can also load programs from it. It's plugged into a real AGC hardware through an interface the restoration team created.
The original MechJeb... awesome. I love the bit where it was fixed... then broke again. The problem was a batch of bad diodes and the supplier got blacklisted back in the 60’s.
Welcome to the world of flight critical Embedded systems/avionics. This is one of the first flight critical systems developed in the world. Oh my has the industry evolved since then but many of the design philosophies were hammered out on the Apollo program. It's an amazing industry that I spent decades working in.
I was working on things made the same way that were fitted to 747's until I left the industry in ~2003. The actual nav system, (modified for terrestrial use*), was still being used to fly aircraft around the world until ~2000. Some of the boxes were still wired the same way.
@@ostlandr 100% Boeing management/corporate preventing proper system engineering on the MAX. Very sad...heard Boeing has taken a $5B charge for the judgement misstep.
From what I understand, the hardware issue they were having with the 737Max were the humanses components. Sounds like they were eating too much resources and drags the whole system down. 😂
@@RunFast64 Pennies saved, billions lost. Oh and taken that human lives cost ~$120k each (yes, I'm surprised too that we actually have a pricetag on human lives), it's more than $5B lost for humanity.
ArsTechnica almost covered it, but I guess they're not the site they used to be as their story just focussed on a bitcoin miner one of the team made to test it and have a bit of a lark. It's kinda of a sad read, because as you say, this is really important work, performed by experts, and something that old Ars would have been on top of by episode 2... but instead the Ars article is basically "lol, AGC is bad at bitcoin mining, ha ha ha".
I would point it out myself but unfortunately I suck at talking to people and even more at making videos but I do tell people about it all the time I can't even begin to understand some of the stuff myself but I know just enough to see the significance
truesus1718 Ars is a sad empty shell of what website it used to be. I miss the old web and if I had a time machine I would go back to 1999 and stay there forever.
The CuriousMarc videos can get very, very technical despite his fantastic delivery style and their very good attempts to simplify the explanations. A lot of people probably just get lost.
Indeed! It could no have happened without them - and they were really under the gun. The program hinged on making those little AGC boxes operative. And imagine having to do a re-work on the core plane when the mis-wire was 5 wraps deep on the wire wrap post! It just had to be correct.
Cynthia Klenk There was an article I heard on NPR how they went on strike for their wages, and the guys tried to do it themselves during the strike, and they admit all their efforts were garbage. When the strike was settled, all the original programmers just threw all the botched programming away and did it themselves once more.
@@GH-oi2jf The great seamstress work was done on the rope memory (ROM) which stored the finished program and mission data by having wires sown differently for a 1 bit than a zero bit. The bit values had all been tested by loading them into those Raytheon emulation modules before being submitted to the seamstresses.
If you watch the series, you see them use a PNP transistor instead of a NPN transistor and use the fault mentioned at 07:40 to make the system work, bloody cleaver. The other option was to (if I recall) unpot the entire core and go looking for the break...
@@lancer2204 I'm not sure if "bloody cleaver" was a typo or a deliberate AvE-ism. I'm guessing it was deliberate and I'm going to add it my lexicon of malapropisms. Thanks.
Watching CuriousMarc's series what I actually found really fascinating was they pointed out all the design flaws - without being negative of course! (edit: Also keeping in mind how incredibly fast MIT had to throw this brand new untested engineering masterpiece together and it still worked)
Looking at all those wire-wound circuits made my mouth go dry. I’ve seen old TVs with wire-wound chassis but never anything that dense. I have utmost respect for those guys for getting that working.
i had an old beehive computer terminal that was constructed with wire wrap, it weighed about 70 pounds and was uppercase only. it had so much wire you couldn't see the circuit boards under the wrapping..
Watch the full series on CuriousMarcs channel. The wire wrapping didn't look like the hardest part. To me it looked like fixing the bad module was crazy difficult. They used schematics and X-rays to plan out the fix, since the bad parts were encased in some kind of plastic. Then Marc went at it like a surgeon and mechanically dug out the area around the bad parts. It really reminded me of expert art restoration/preservation that museums perform.
Two of my favourite channels together in one place - amazing! It's also amazing that this resurrection wasn't organised by NASA, or a museum, but by private individuals.... an incredible story from start to finish.
After all, it's good to know that the world is a small place with Scott, the droid, Fran, Clive, Techmoan, Mr. Carlson's lab and that crazy, no good Aussie among a few others...
There are bodies lying in disarray not only in the US of A but around the entire planet. These guys should have recognised the risks before going public! Hey nobody's complaining, they're just going to have to explain why they were late for work on Monday morning?
This is an example of the original definition of "hacker." (I mean, the good sense of the term.) I'm glad to see that this level of nerdom still exists in the world!
It felt like they were waking up the fourth Apollo astronaut on a Saturn v launch, who, upon opening his/her eyes said "Where am I? Where's my spacecraft?" Such amazing hardware! And the architecture! I'm blown away, thanks Scott! Thanks for taking us along. Much appreciated! 🙂
Somewhere a person is on their latest generation cell phone. They are complaining to their friend, who is all about manned spaceflight and Apollo, that Apollo didn't make any difference in anyone's life.
@@goku445 Says the person typing their comment into a computer, using the internet, a system designed to safe guard communication against nuclear attack. I can certainly understand the conflict, but by using the technology, you're now a beneficiary of it, and one could well argue...complicit of it? ...you can always turn off your computer and go live in the forest?
What these people have done, THAT is the spirit and competence that got us to the Moon. I can not compliment these guys enough. They deserve a Presidential Medal!
@@Belioyt I'm European. And it's sad that I understand this immediately. And no, he isn't. Sad to see whats going on in DC/ the capitol right now. What a disgrace...
Then the program code is quite the opposite with it's commands, having comments such as "FLAGORGY" (basically FLAGINIT) at the start of the program, as shown own CuriousMarc's recent IBM 1401 homage to the AGC.
Mike Stewart is a hero of mine. He shows that with enough passion, skill, and hard work one can become a world-class expert at something no matter how complicated and unique the subject is. The team that worked on the AGC is more than worthy of all the attention this project gets. Super cool that you were able to get over there to get some footage and ask some good questions.
This is not Minecraft. To build a gate exact replica, it would take up at least 64 chunks, with dozens of layers. This is assuming you are using RedPower or an equivalent at a vastly increased tick rate, as it would be completely impossible with normal redstone.
@@user2C47 There are minecraft mods that allow you to build ics. You can design a redstone circuit for a gate or even a few gates on one chip and the chip will be on block like a redstone repeater in vanilla minecraft. You might be able to build a gate exact replica that runs at a decreased speed using those mods.
@@lobsterbark I was thinking RedPower because it allows for integrated logic gates, and wires that can be placed on any surface and do not require repeaters. The mod also allows for combining up to 16 signals into 1 cable. I also mentioned increasing the tick speed so the computer would be faster.
@@user2C47 you can use carpet mod or carpet client to tickwarp, and you can use super circuit maker to compress the circuits it is an 8x8 stone tile that you can place even redpower components onto and it only takes up one block of space so that could compress it even more and make it actually possible
There's probably a Mercury-Redstone joke to be had here, but I can't quite make it work. :) To expand: The Redstone rocket was an early army weapon, named for the base it was developed at. It was also a direct descendant of the German V-2, with several of the same people working on the design - but let's not dwell on that. Redstone was combined with the first human-rated capsule - Mercury - and improved for safety to launch the first Americans into space in the '50s. While Saturn V was not a direct descendant, it was designed by some of the same people - and the entire Apollo program was a direct continuation of the Mercury project. So - no AGC without Redstone.
I had been watching them since their first video some how showed up in my suggestion box, which was the best suggestion RUclips has ever made. It is amazingly gratifying watching them all repair, troubleshoot, and play with an original AGC using today's technology. I implore those who haven't watched the series to do so. This is some amazing people doing amazing things!
I don’t understand most of this technical stuff, but I applaud the effort to understand the cutting-edge genius of those who got us to the moon. Excellent work
I'm old enough at 55 to have watched somebody making up a prototyping board with wire wrap and discrete components as part of a degree course project. At least it wasn't state of the art even then! Wonderful and stirring stuff. Thanks for sharing.
+++++x99999 for Curious Marc and his team for re-animating not only this iconic piece of hardware but all the legacy pieces of data processing hardware as well. Mega kudos to Scott for producing this vid.
Thanks Scott for spreading the word on Marc and his band of “merry geniuses” each one of his crew are such an inspiration. And a special thanks to the owner of the agc for having the foresight to buy it.
I absolutely admire and salute the skills of these gentlemen, as a former electronic technician in the USAF... Wow! Electronics is pretty durable if you keep it inside in a decent environment... Still, the way these geniuses were able to improvise is pretty amazing.
This computer is hardware accelerated, but designed for a completely different purpose. Anyway, a computer of that power could only run simple text based applications. To render a full video, it would take multiple years.
This is a remarkable achievement. Thank you so much for bring this to our attention. This computer may well have been the largest technological contribution to mankind of the Apollo program.
The guy in the Apollo t-shirt is a genius. He can get anything working. Smart bunch of guys there. Been watching it on Marc's channel for a while and its amazing what they have done.
lunarmodule5 has a set of 10-hour videos coming out now... you should be watching them, of course. The latest one has the landing and the EVA, about 8 hours in. Super content, best on the web for this experience IMO... they edit together all source video/audio available, you get to hear and see from multiple viewpoints.
Hopefully, he'll condense it into a documentary. Found it more fascinating in how the look of the AGC defined what people in the old days thought computers would always look like. The HAL 9000 was based on the same large featureless plastic blocks of potting compound, stacked in rows.
Scott, an interesting tidbit is that IBM adapted tablet pressing machinery from the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture magnetic memory cores. You might appreciate some of the RUclips videos where IBM's 1401, which dates to the end of the 1950s, is operating.
And the programs were hand wound using those ferrite beads by scores of gals who built them - by hand. hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were responsible for getting humans to the moon and back. Everyone was doing their part and were totally committed - those were the days..... "We need to do what!!??" followed by "Can do!" were the operative words.
@@cynthiaklenk6313 yup. I lived in Bethpage where the LEM was built. Grumman employed about 125 thousand people. Not only to work on the LEM, but tbey had navy contracts for rhe E2C (Hawkeye), F-14 (tomcat) and a lot of other aircraft. My friends dad was responsible for the LEM wiring. Grumman brought in the Guppy to bring it to Florida. It flew right over my house. (I was 1/2 mile from end if runway at Grumman)
Been watching the AGC rebuild and it a great channel , these few guys fixing it just blows me away when the org took hundreds, prob in the thousands of people to create .
That is one hell of a staggering achievement. And flying a simulator with the real hardware, I don't think words are enough, nor do they give due credit to the team.
Fascinating....... What a great amount of passion and technical knowledge to spend time on a project like this. All very cool to see technology of the past come back to life :) Like driving down the highway in a Ford model A :) Watching this video, I have just realised how much we take miniaturization for granted!!!
What a lucky guy you are Scott! Thank you so must for sharing this. Probably the greatest retro computer of all time. Absolutely fascinating. The team involved should be commended.
Curious Marc is scarily good at resurecting. I guess if you gave him the bones of an Assyrian astronomer, Marc would have him resurrected within a few weeks and he'd be calculating away like it's 1999 B.C.
Loved the NASSP shoutout. I was a developer on that project for about 2-3 years starting in 2006. It's still one of the things I enjoyed working on the most.
@@acynder1 You could write an x86 emulator for the AGC which interfaces with an attached computer (for IO and extra RAM), and as such, with extreme patience you could actually "run" KSP on the AGC in a sort of way. As for using KSP with the AGC, you could write a mod that interfaces with the AGC, but it wouldn't do much.
This video series by CuriousMarc must be the most interesting yet uncomprehesible bit of RUclips I've seen so far. Mike has a ridiculous understanding of the systems used on Apollo missions. Massive achievement of the guys involved. Glad to see you cover it. I'm too young to have any memories of the moon landing, but it shows what it took to get 3 guys in orbit and 2 on the surface of the moon. In and era so far removed from today's integration of digital technology. Makes one proud to be human.
I've been watching CuriousMarc's AGC restoration series since it started a few months ago -- it's really been an amazing thing to watch. The knowledge those guys have is mind-boggling.
The computer equivalent of the Late Stone Age is truly fascinating to see working. As a programmer I want to get my hands on this hardware and see what I can make it do, but as a human who wants to keep his sanity I want to stay far, far away from hardware this old.
The simulation of this computer is free. Someone recently took a complier they had written and write a code generator for the AGC. It nearly drove him mad so I get what you're saying!
I've followed this entire restoration series, it's amazing how they fixed and solve some of the problems they encountered. Some of it is a bit over my head as well but they do explain things really well. Worth checking out!
My reaction/feeling on watching this is just mind numbing awe at how clever some people are both back then and now. And yet look at the state of the world in many cases...
Just thinking 50 years ago, computational technology was not comparable to ours...but the flown to the moo and back. Thank you Scott! Really exiting !!!!!
Absolutely fantastic restoration and great video work - I love the excitement you have on your face as you hold in your hands one of the memory modules! Thankyou for sharing this
Wow! Just... ...Wow! It's mind boggling that just the computer worked back then, but that It did that together with all the sensors and other cutting edge tech that was invented for this "far out (yes mildly funny punt?) trip. Thank you everybody for restoring and bringing it to life, and then to us!
I've took a cursory look at Luminary, the Moon landing portion of the software and it's not unlike a modern consumer quad copter flight controller in that it appears to use the same approach to sensor fusion via vectors / matrices and a Kalman filter
Eldon Hall, hardware designer of the AGC and one of my relatives, wrote a fairly neat and book about the computer called "Journey to the Moon" if y'all are interested.
Eldon helped the owner of this AGC! You could say he was an early part of the restoration effort. He gets a shout out by the owner in Episode 1 of the restoration.
I've been following these guys work, and I love what they're doing. Looks like something I would do. I'm a retired embedded control engineer, so I understand a lot of what they are doing. And yes, I still have all my wire wrap gear. Built my first computer back in 1976, an RCA Cosmac Elf, with an 1802 processor and 256 bytes of ram. I'm about to sell it to a collector.
I recently watched the video of how they made the memory modules. It gives so much more value to what I am seeing now. Seeing the people weave the wire like yarn into the cores were amazing. Thanks for showing us this!
Note the "Fratelli Solari" italian clock in background, Fratelli Solari was the italian company that invented the flipping mechanism that everybody uses today ;-D
The series is well worth a watch, even if you're not into electronics, seeing how they have to do so much detective work to discover what's wrong with this archaic tech (involving some complex radio signalling, x-ray machines and digging through government archives to find solutions). They couldn't have achieved what they did without sponsorship and help from a couple of companies and several generous donators. The young guy works for SpaceX and is obsessed with the AGC, he seems to know every single component by heart! After watching Ben Eater's breadboard computer series I was almost able to keep up with the geekspeak!
Brilliant. I've been watching these guys working on this project for about a year I guess. I gather they are employees of a computer museum. Absolute geniuses!
Some viewers asked for a family-friendly summary version of the ongoing restoration saga. Now I don’t have to do it, here it is! Thanks for coming and making yet another superb video.
Ey found curiousmarc here!
Wheres the non family friendly version im curious?
@@Tzphardi I think the "non-family friendly" version is just the full series on Marcs channel.
By "non-family friendly," I assume they're referring to people not being able to keep up without some fluency in hardware-level computing? I do some hardware building with my retro computers (got a few projects in the works), and am no means an expert (it's just my hobby), but I was able to at least follow along through the entire series, so it's not too difficult if you have some basic fluency.
Hahaha, your series isn't family-friendly? I think that might attract me to it... :-D
I imagine those Raytheon engineers would be as blown away looking at that connected laptop as we are blown away by their groundbreaking flight computer.
If they are still alive. Sadly, I'd say a good number of them are not.
And the Middle East is "blown away" by their Tomahawk cruise missiles...
I don't think i've ever seen more competent people work on anything. The AGC-restoration series is a rare gem.
i don't like using the term hacker very often, because it's an overused term that gets applied to trivial things. these guys, however, are HACKERS.
I've been a fan of CuriousMarc's channel for a long while now and I'd rate the AGC restoration as one of their best series yet (Mike is an absolute genius). Also check out the alto restoration, The 70's windows computer that Jobs stole the look and feel for his Mac.
Mike is impossible levels of brilliant.
Why I'm still holding onto my windows 95 discs.😁
@@hqqns Ive been following him a while now. The AGC was a sudden and amazing surprise.
These guys undertook a mission worthy of 1960's NASA itself. It's also heartwarming to see both young and older minds involved in this incredible project.
Huge resect and admiration for this project. Amazing minds in this room.
Scott - this is absolute art. I'm an electrical engineer who graduated in 1974. I was peering very hard at the schematic - many many many flip flops (those are the transistor pairs) and gates! They had to squish what would have been several 8 foot racks into that tiny footprint. I grew up with this technology and tube technology before that. We used core plane RAM for event storage (projects for the Atomic Energy Commission (Now Dept. of Energy)). I remember the first time I saw a transistor! It was germanium and very fragile. - And this team had to trouble shoot, locate, and dig out and replace a defective diode that had been potted? Wow! My bet it was a IN34 diode :-) The first logic chips I designed and worked with were TTL, and we also used Emitter Coupled Logic, (ECL) . I have done a ton of wire wrap prototyping too (those little tools in the holders on the board are wire wrap--de-wrap tools . Thus I can't see for beans any more (nothing to do with my age) LoL. Thank you again Scott! )))HUGG(((
The diodes they had to replace were in fact 1N916B. Still manufactured today. There was no germanium component used in the AGC.
Having attended the US Navy's Basic Electricity and Electronics School and specialized electronics courses relevant to specific hardware in the early 1980s all of this looks very familiar. The digital combat system and all of its supporting computers (AN/UYK-7 or, simply, the "Yuck-7") required robust construction and durable components to meet the demands of a warship in combat conditions, much as the guidance computer of a rocket might require.
It's also my understanding that the water effluent from the fuel cells went into the cooling jackets for the guidance computer and, indeed, the Yuck-7 was also water-cooled, with a dedicated refrigeration plant providing chilled-water for the electronics cooling system.
Glad you got that experience and felt like sharing..................................
Karl Brundage the same for me working on the AN/AYK-14 Airborne computers which were air cooled. The first ones I worked on had two banks of 64 K Words of core memory. They were tough beasts that had to endure very rough operating conditions.
The equipment built for (and supported by guys and gals like you) for the USN was frighteningly rugged! It had to be! You are right on the water cooling for the AGC unit. I remember reading years ago that this was using water cooling from the fuel cells. I know much of the avionics used in the Shuttle Transport System (STS) was water cooled in the same way.
@@cynthiaklenk6313 One of the stories I tell my nephews is that when we were doing "local ops" around Hawaii we did a training regimen we referred to as "Drilling and Spilling", where we simulated everything from nuclear war to the loss of lube-oil pressure for the main engines.
These drills happened between 0600 and 1800, and if you had the mid-watch (from 0000-0600) the night before you were absolutely exhausted.
I found that it was completely ridiculous to go to your rack to sleep, as within 15 minutes of falling asleep the general alarm, collision alarm or some other announcement of doom would make you spring from your slumber and into immediate action.
Instead, I simply went up to the Sonar Equipment room, where the Yuck-7s were purring along and wedged myself between two of them. The combination of their nice, warm heat and the mini-vibrations of their fans and the ship's motion put me to sleep like a baby in a car seat on the dryer........
Good times..............................
Chilled water is the lifeblood of a Warship.
I worked on some of those chilled water plants on a ship. Also a former EOW 🤠
Oh and they even made the simulated inertial sensor (called a PIPA)... and did a moon landing with a real AGC... Mad Props to these guys.
Went through the surface of the moon there though. Numbers on the DSKY I bet no one would be happy to have seen on there back then :D Incredible work, they're legends.
@@Dimble And landed on their side :P
"Houston, the Eagle has landed... Like an albatross." xD
Only the landing didn'T stopped when they reached the surface.
The first to land inside the moon!
Would you buy a startup DVD based on an actual AGC coded moon landing simulation complete with NASA dialogues? One that could be developed into a full on simulator if you wished to?
HappyBeezerStudios - by Lord_Mogul It proves that the moon isn't real! (So obviously joking though)
Clarification, the stuff that's running on the laptop there emulates diagnostic control panels that would have been used in the lab on the ground during AGC development and testing, as well as the astronauts' UI (DSKY), and they can also load programs from it. It's plugged into a real AGC hardware through an interface the restoration team created.
The original MechJeb... awesome. I love the bit where it was fixed... then broke again. The problem was a batch of bad diodes and the supplier got blacklisted back in the 60’s.
This is why all the mechjeb haters can suck it.
There are probably some vintage audio repair folk bitching about those diodes today! :)
Welcome to the world of flight critical Embedded systems/avionics. This is one of the first flight critical systems developed in the world. Oh my has the industry evolved since then but many of the design philosophies were hammered out on the Apollo program. It's an amazing industry that I spent decades working in.
Maybe these guys can give Boeing a hand with the 737MAX.
I was working on things made the same way that were fitted to 747's until I left the industry in ~2003. The actual nav system, (modified for terrestrial use*), was still being used to fly aircraft around the world until ~2000. Some of the boxes were still wired the same way.
@@ostlandr 100% Boeing management/corporate preventing proper system engineering on the MAX. Very sad...heard Boeing has taken a $5B charge for the judgement misstep.
From what I understand, the hardware issue they were having with the 737Max were the humanses components. Sounds like they were eating too much resources and drags the whole system down. 😂
@@RunFast64 Pennies saved, billions lost. Oh and taken that human lives cost ~$120k each (yes, I'm surprised too that we actually have a pricetag on human lives), it's more than $5B lost for humanity.
My god, it's full of wires!
✨
nice (i got the joke)
Is seems to run on some form of electricity.
Me to!
Daisy, dai... sy...
8:34 That's an overjoyed Scott Manley
this is unfathomably important work, and this channel is the only place i've seen it covered!
It's been covered on FB and Curious Marc's channel too
ArsTechnica almost covered it, but I guess they're not the site they used to be as their story just focussed on a bitcoin miner one of the team made to test it and have a bit of a lark. It's kinda of a sad read, because as you say, this is really important work, performed by experts, and something that old Ars would have been on top of by episode 2... but instead the Ars article is basically "lol, AGC is bad at bitcoin mining, ha ha ha".
I would point it out myself but unfortunately I suck at talking to people and even more at making videos but I do tell people about it all the time I can't even begin to understand some of the stuff myself but I know just enough to see the significance
truesus1718 Ars is a sad empty shell of what website it used to be. I miss the old web and if I had a time machine I would go back to 1999 and stay there forever.
The CuriousMarc videos can get very, very technical despite his fantastic delivery style and their very good attempts to simplify the explanations. A lot of people probably just get lost.
This video simply does not do justice to the *enormous* cleverness that Curious Marc & Co employed to get this AGC back to life. Chapeau!
Honestly, its not really possible to do them justice, such a work of art fixing a work of art.
What about the enormous cleverness off the people who designed and built the first AGC.
Bart Sibrel
the restoration video series has become one of my favorites on RUclips. well done curious Marc :D
Bless the seamstress’s that literally wove all that by hand.
AGC: “I do one thing and one thing only: I fly in space and land on the moon”
Indeed! It could no have happened without them - and they were really under the gun. The program hinged on making those little AGC boxes operative. And imagine having to do a re-work on the core plane when the mis-wire was 5 wraps deep on the wire wrap post! It just had to be correct.
Cynthia Klenk There was an article I heard on NPR how they went on strike for their wages, and the guys tried to do it themselves during the strike, and they admit all their efforts were garbage. When the strike was settled, all the original programmers just threw all the botched programming away and did it themselves once more.
Char Aznable - Core memories were well developed by the time of Apollo.
@@GH-oi2jf The great seamstress work was done on the rope memory (ROM) which stored the finished program and mission data by having wires sown differently for a 1 bit than a zero bit. The bit values had all been tested by loading them into those Raytheon emulation modules before being submitted to the seamstresses.
3:30 "for us it's the eq. of the moon landing" bruh moment
06:52 just casually whips out the 100 page schematics
11:10 what a nightmare
The amount of brainpower put into making these beautiful machines
Woah!
If you watch the series, you see them use a PNP transistor instead of a NPN transistor and use the fault mentioned at 07:40 to make the system work, bloody cleaver. The other option was to (if I recall) unpot the entire core and go looking for the break...
@@lancer2204 I'm not sure if "bloody cleaver" was a typo or a deliberate AvE-ism. I'm guessing it was deliberate and I'm going to add it my lexicon of malapropisms. Thanks.
@@megamind6000 Keep up the good work...
Jesus, not only are these things technical marvels but they are works of art! Form and function.
Watching CuriousMarc's series what I actually found really fascinating was they pointed out all the design flaws - without being negative of course! (edit: Also keeping in mind how incredibly fast MIT had to throw this brand new untested engineering masterpiece together and it still worked)
Form FROM function. Function begetting form organically.
Works of art which don't work.
Looking at all those wire-wound circuits made my mouth go dry. I’ve seen old TVs with wire-wound chassis but never anything that dense. I have utmost respect for those guys for getting that working.
You should see the backplane of an old DEC VAX system, its 5 layer and a fair bit denser
i had an old beehive computer terminal that was constructed with wire wrap, it weighed about 70 pounds and was uppercase only. it had so much wire you couldn't see the circuit boards under the wrapping..
Watch the full series on CuriousMarcs channel. The wire wrapping didn't look like the hardest part. To me it looked like fixing the bad module was crazy difficult. They used schematics and X-rays to plan out the fix, since the bad parts were encased in some kind of plastic. Then Marc went at it like a surgeon and mechanically dug out the area around the bad parts. It really reminded me of expert art restoration/preservation that museums perform.
We called them “wire wrap” circuit boards. I still have the wrapping tools and wire.
I built an 8080 computer using wire wrap
Two of my favourite channels together in one place - amazing! It's also amazing that this resurrection wasn't organised by NASA, or a museum, but by private individuals.... an incredible story from start to finish.
Everyone here subscribed to this channel should also be following CuriousMarc, been loving his restorations and had a BLAST following the AGC work!
After all, it's good to know that the world is a small place with Scott, the droid, Fran, Clive, Techmoan, Mr. Carlson's lab and that crazy, no good Aussie among a few others...
These guys are absolute geniuses. They did history a huge favour indeed!
@@betta67 and everyone, do yourself a favour and watch glasslinger make some tubes/valves by hand.
There are bodies lying in disarray not only in the US of A but around the entire planet. These guys should have recognised the risks before going public! Hey nobody's complaining, they're just going to have to explain why they were late for work on Monday morning?
His R2D2 droid is also pretty incredible!
This is an example of the original definition of "hacker." (I mean, the good sense of the term.)
I'm glad to see that this level of nerdom still exists in the world!
It felt like they were waking up the fourth Apollo astronaut on a Saturn v launch, who, upon opening his/her eyes said "Where am I? Where's my spacecraft?"
Such amazing hardware! And the architecture!
I'm blown away, thanks Scott! Thanks for taking us along. Much appreciated! 🙂
Somewhere a person is on their latest generation cell phone. They are complaining to their friend, who is all about manned spaceflight and Apollo, that Apollo didn't make any difference in anyone's life.
@@goku445 Are you equating Manned Spaceflight with warfare? There's a debatable topic.
@@luciusvorenus9445 it was a type of war
@@goku445 Says the person typing their comment into a computer, using the internet, a system designed to safe guard communication against nuclear attack.
I can certainly understand the conflict, but by using the technology, you're now a beneficiary of it, and one could well argue...complicit of it?
...you can always turn off your computer and go live in the forest?
Beyond the Cold War, the real enemies in space travel are gravity and time.
What these people have done, THAT is the spirit and competence that got us to the Moon. I can not compliment these guys enough. They deserve a Presidential Medal!
I don't think 45 is upto the task
@@Belioyt I'm European. And it's sad that I understand this immediately. And no, he isn't.
Sad to see whats going on in DC/ the capitol right now. What a disgrace...
LOL, they have made a simulation program work, nothing to do with the original AGC.
@@pascalxavier3367 Then you have not paid attention. They have gotten the entire configuration functioning as new. Very much worth watching.
@@alpcns No, they have just built a simulation with modern software and modern hardware, a simulation which proves absolutely nothing.
These guys are incredibly talented, good on you for highlighting their efforts!
I love that some of the verbs were so polite. "Please perform" or "Please mark"
I would assume that this was a real time computer and that the "please" commands are only to be run if cycles are available ?
@@CalgarGTX Could be. I spotted the list in the early part of this video.
Then the program code is quite the opposite with it's commands, having comments such as "FLAGORGY" (basically FLAGINIT) at the start of the program, as shown own CuriousMarc's recent IBM 1401 homage to the AGC.
Ouh! Civil discourse.....how novel.
@@rkan2 As in 1401 Autocoder?
Mike Stewart is a hero of mine. He shows that with enough passion, skill, and hard work one can become a world-class expert at something no matter how complicated and unique the subject is. The team that worked on the AGC is more than worthy of all the attention this project gets. Super cool that you were able to get over there to get some footage and ask some good questions.
I'm not good enough with redstone to understand this
This is not Minecraft. To build a gate exact replica, it would take up at least 64 chunks, with dozens of layers. This is assuming you are using RedPower or an equivalent at a vastly increased tick rate, as it would be completely impossible with normal redstone.
@@user2C47 There are minecraft mods that allow you to build ics. You can design a redstone circuit for a gate or even a few gates on one chip and the chip will be on block like a redstone repeater in vanilla minecraft. You might be able to build a gate exact replica that runs at a decreased speed using those mods.
@@lobsterbark I was thinking RedPower because it allows for integrated logic gates, and wires that can be placed on any surface and do not require repeaters. The mod also allows for combining up to 16 signals into 1 cable. I also mentioned increasing the tick speed so the computer would be faster.
@@user2C47 you can use carpet mod or carpet client to tickwarp, and you can use super circuit maker to compress the circuits it is an 8x8 stone tile that you can place even redpower components onto and it only takes up one block of space so that could compress it even more and make it actually possible
There's probably a Mercury-Redstone joke to be had here, but I can't quite make it work. :)
To expand:
The Redstone rocket was an early army weapon, named for the base it was developed at. It was also a direct descendant of the German V-2, with several of the same people working on the design - but let's not dwell on that. Redstone was combined with the first human-rated capsule - Mercury - and improved for safety to launch the first Americans into space in the '50s. While Saturn V was not a direct descendant, it was designed by some of the same people - and the entire Apollo program was a direct continuation of the Mercury project.
So - no AGC without Redstone.
Hopefully this bumps up curiousmarcs subscribers to the level the channel deserves.
I had been watching them since their first video some how showed up in my suggestion box, which was the best suggestion RUclips has ever made. It is amazingly gratifying watching them all repair, troubleshoot, and play with an original AGC using today's technology. I implore those who haven't watched the series to do so. This is some amazing people doing amazing things!
I don’t understand most of this technical stuff, but I applaud the effort to understand the cutting-edge genius of those who got us to the moon. Excellent work
Can't believe you gotten to touch those Scott, what an experience.
This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen on RUclips. The amount of work that went into this is amazing.
Amazing. They are some of the best in the world. Programmers/ engineers/ electronics tech/ electricians. you name it they can do it obviously.
I'm old enough at 55 to have watched somebody making up a prototyping board with wire wrap and discrete components as part of a degree course project. At least it wasn't state of the art even then! Wonderful and stirring stuff. Thanks for sharing.
+++++x99999 for Curious Marc and his team for re-animating not only this iconic piece of hardware but all the legacy pieces of data processing hardware as well.
Mega kudos to Scott for producing this vid.
Bart sibrel
Thanks Scott for spreading the word on Marc and his band of “merry geniuses” each one of his crew are such an inspiration. And a special thanks to the owner of the agc for having the foresight to buy it.
I absolutely admire and salute the skills of these gentlemen, as a former electronic technician in the USAF... Wow! Electronics is pretty durable if you keep it inside in a decent environment... Still, the way these geniuses were able to improvise is pretty amazing.
Outstanding work, and glad for the Orbiter shoutout! I have simulated every Apollo missions from launch to splashdown in Orbiter.
Oh cool you visited these guys! I've been following the developments and their exploits recently. So awesome!
Looks like Scott has found a replacement for his stolen laptop.
This computer is hardware accelerated, but designed for a completely different purpose. Anyway, a computer of that power could only run simple text based applications. To render a full video, it would take multiple years.
@@user2C47 r/WOOSH
@Alex Jamieson
We know that, We're not as stupid as you apparently think we are.
Alex Jamieson this is gold. r/woosh
Now it just needs the remove before flight tags.
That is impressive, good job guys!
I love that fact that punch cards were used in machines to wrap wires on the pins.
This is a remarkable achievement. Thank you so much for bring this to our attention.
This computer may well have been the largest technological contribution to mankind of the Apollo program.
I’ve been waiting for this since I saw you show up on CuriousMarc’s channel! An amazing engineering feat!
The guy in the Apollo t-shirt is a genius. He can get anything working. Smart bunch of guys there. Been watching it on Marc's channel for a while and its amazing what they have done.
Truth
Scott really likes those 10 hour fireplace videos eh?
Saved me pointing it out...
We need a 10 hour Saturn V exhaust video.
lunarmodule5 has a set of 10-hour videos coming out now... you should be watching them, of course. The latest one has the landing and the EVA, about 8 hours in. Super content, best on the web for this experience IMO... they edit together all source video/audio available, you get to hear and see from multiple viewpoints.
This series was amazing to watch
lel
Thanks for giving attention to this great youtuber (and his team). I've been following the AGC restoration from day one.
I've been following this series and when i saw you show up in one episode i was so stoked
Been watching these guys bring this back to life. ALOT of work put into those boards.
That computer is a work of art to me.
so... much... brilliance... I would just be overwhelmed in that room with all that smarts.. great job guys!
Hopefully, he'll condense it into a documentary. Found it more fascinating in how the look of the AGC defined what people in the old days thought computers would always look like. The HAL 9000 was based on the same large featureless plastic blocks of potting compound, stacked in rows.
Is that true? Would production artists have had access to an AGC or more likely that computers of that era used modules plugged into a back plane.
This is flat out gold Scott, thank you for taping this,
The Polaris Submarine Navigation system also used a core memory as a part of its Nav computer. May be the same one.
Scott, an interesting tidbit is that IBM adapted tablet pressing machinery from the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture magnetic memory cores.
You might appreciate some of the RUclips videos where IBM's 1401, which dates to the end of the 1950s, is operating.
My first job was on IBM 407 machines using plugboard wiring to program it, them i went to the 1401. 360, 370. 4300 series and s/390 machines
And the programs were hand wound using those ferrite beads by scores of gals who built them - by hand. hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were responsible for getting humans to the moon and back. Everyone was doing their part and were totally committed - those were the days..... "We need to do what!!??" followed by "Can do!" were the operative words.
@@cynthiaklenk6313 yup. I lived in Bethpage where the LEM was built. Grumman employed about 125 thousand people. Not only to work on the LEM, but tbey had navy contracts for rhe E2C (Hawkeye), F-14 (tomcat) and a lot of other aircraft. My friends dad was responsible for the LEM wiring. Grumman brought in the Guppy to bring it to Florida. It flew right over my house. (I was 1/2 mile from end if runway at Grumman)
Wow, how cool are these engineers bringing tech history to life. Thanks for sharing this video step back into Apollo history!
Been watching the AGC rebuild and it a great channel , these few guys fixing it just blows me away when the org took hundreds, prob in the thousands of people to create .
Love your reaction when opening the Apollo computer.
That is one hell of a staggering achievement. And flying a simulator with the real hardware, I don't think words are enough, nor do they give due credit to the team.
Fascinating....... What a great amount of passion and technical knowledge to spend time on a project like this.
All very cool to see technology of the past come back to life :) Like driving down the highway in a Ford model A :)
Watching this video, I have just realised how much we take miniaturization for granted!!!
What a lucky guy you are Scott! Thank you so must for sharing this. Probably the greatest retro computer of all time. Absolutely fascinating. The team involved should be commended.
Mikes knowledge and problem solving with this thing is genuinely amazing.
PS: He does not work for SpaceX. see comment below.
Not f nothing he works for SpaceX, he's a real genius
It's the greatest computer restoration project ever, in terms of its challenges and its significance.
Check out "The MIT Science Reporter- A computer for Apollo".
Curious Marc is scarily good at resurecting. I guess if you gave him the bones of an Assyrian astronomer, Marc would have him resurrected within a few weeks and he'd be calculating away like it's 1999 B.C.
Been watching Marc's content, really interesting stuff. The teletype series was great as well.
Loved the NASSP shoutout. I was a developer on that project for about 2-3 years starting in 2006. It's still one of the things I enjoyed working on the most.
Using a ACTUAL NASA Guidance computer for your Space Flight Sim is next level nerd right there! So amazing though.
Can it run ksp?
@@acynder1 You could write an x86 emulator for the AGC which interfaces with an attached computer (for IO and extra RAM), and as such, with extreme patience you could actually "run" KSP on the AGC in a sort of way.
As for using KSP with the AGC, you could write a mod that interfaces with the AGC, but it wouldn't do much.
@@kargaroc386 I don't think you can due to the limitations of how much memory can be addressed by the computer.
4:46. . . . Talk about finding a treasure!! Legacy data still being present after so very many years is just mind blowing.
we got to see scott squee like a schoolgirl. totally awesome
This video series by CuriousMarc must be the most interesting yet uncomprehesible bit of RUclips I've seen so far. Mike has a ridiculous understanding of the systems used on Apollo missions.
Massive achievement of the guys involved. Glad to see you cover it. I'm too young to have any memories of the moon landing, but it shows what it took to get 3 guys in orbit and 2 on the surface of the moon. In and era so far removed from today's integration of digital technology. Makes one proud to be human.
Me again... that wire wrapped backplane reminds me of the old Burroughs B500 that I used to look after.
I've been watching CuriousMarc's AGC restoration series since it started a few months ago -- it's really been an amazing thing to watch. The knowledge those guys have is mind-boggling.
Amazing effort. Marc, Mike and crew are steely eyed missile men.
One of the best things this month, Scott. Bravo!
"Hell my watch is more powerful than this"
-Scott Manley
2k19
Azazel His car key fob is actually more powerful then that.
@@kentnebergall3156 true
Curious Marc's videos are also really interesting to watch regarding this subject! Totally deserved shoutout :)
The computer equivalent of the Late Stone Age is truly fascinating to see working. As a programmer I want to get my hands on this hardware and see what I can make it do, but as a human who wants to keep his sanity I want to stay far, far away from hardware this old.
The simulation of this computer is free. Someone recently took a complier they had written and write a code generator for the AGC. It nearly drove him mad so I get what you're saying!
I've followed this entire restoration series, it's amazing how they fixed and solve some of the problems they encountered. Some of it is a bit over my head as well but they do explain things really well. Worth checking out!
My reaction/feeling on watching this is just mind numbing awe at how clever some people are both back then and now. And yet look at the state of the world in many cases...
Just thinking 50 years ago, computational technology was not comparable to ours...but the flown to the moo and back.
Thank you Scott!
Really exiting !!!!!
Rob Goodsight too the moo, haha.
@@loganiushere 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣...just didn't realise that
they had custom pins made for the interface! fantastic!
Absolutely fantastic restoration and great video work - I love the excitement you have on your face as you hold in your hands one of the memory modules! Thankyou for sharing this
8:34. . . Scott Manley geeking out!! Lmao!! ;-)
That was hilarious yes
It was a nerdgasm!
Wow! Just... ...Wow!
It's mind boggling that just the computer worked back then,
but that It did that together with all the sensors and other cutting edge tech
that was invented for this "far out (yes mildly funny punt?) trip.
Thank you everybody for restoring and bringing it to life, and then to us!
I've took a cursory look at Luminary, the Moon landing portion of the software and it's not unlike a modern consumer quad copter flight controller in that it appears to use the same approach to sensor fusion via vectors / matrices and a Kalman filter
Eldon Hall, hardware designer of the AGC and one of my relatives, wrote a fairly neat and book about the computer called "Journey to the Moon" if y'all are interested.
Eldon helped the owner of this AGC! You could say he was an early part of the restoration effort. He gets a shout out by the owner in Episode 1 of the restoration.
Hey I think they just did a demo for Mr. Hall. ( The AGC restoration team)
@@djmips Yes, we had the privilege of bringing the setup to Eldon's home and demonstrating a landing for him
seeing this computer communicating through that basic displays, and still knowing what that thing is capable of behind that dispaly is amazing
Absolutely incredible, human kind is capable of such incredible miraculous genius and horror, it's nice to see the genius side :)
I've been following these guys work, and I love what they're doing. Looks like something I would do.
I'm a retired embedded control engineer, so I understand a lot of what they are doing. And yes, I still have all my wire wrap gear.
Built my first computer back in 1976, an RCA Cosmac Elf, with an 1802 processor and 256 bytes of ram. I'm about to sell it to a collector.
Of COURSE I've been following the CuriousMarc channel. :p
So pleased you got to see the team in action. What an amazing achievement on restoring the AGC. AWESOME
The nerdery in this video is over the moon, excellent stuff!
They should get Buzz Aldrin to give it a spin :D
Scott would cream his pants if that happened.
I recently watched the video of how they made the memory modules. It gives so much more value to what I am seeing now. Seeing the people weave the wire like yarn into the cores were amazing. Thanks for showing us this!
Note the "Fratelli Solari" italian clock in background, Fratelli Solari was the italian company that invented the flipping mechanism that everybody uses today ;-D
Italia has some awesome mathematicians.
That’s so freakin cool to see working, I can Barely get wires neat in my computer but they programmed a robot to weave all those wires that’s amazing.
I kept expecting to hear "hello doctor Chandra, I'm ready for my first lesson".
Same here, when he pulled out that one module I was waiting for it start singing Daisy.
José Cassiano Grassi Gunji 30 years too early. Plus the AGC is from MIT, HAL was from Carnegie.
@@RCAvhstape In the German version HAL sings "Hänschen klein".
Ah, more like offering to sing "Daisy" for the restoration techs.
@@Christian-zv2em In the Italian version HAL sings "Giro giro tondo".
The series is well worth a watch, even if you're not into electronics, seeing how they have to do so much detective work to discover what's wrong with this archaic tech (involving some complex radio signalling, x-ray machines and digging through government archives to find solutions). They couldn't have achieved what they did without sponsorship and help from a couple of companies and several generous donators. The young guy works for SpaceX and is obsessed with the AGC, he seems to know every single component by heart! After watching Ben Eater's breadboard computer series I was almost able to keep up with the geekspeak!
Wow that is so cool.
Old but not dead still working, modern computer can't survive that long.
Not quite as old as the AGC but I have an IBM 5160 from the early 1980s in perfect working condition.
To be fair they had to restore it for it to work, similarly as a modern computer likely would have to if it got booted up in 50 years
Brilliant. I've been watching these guys working on this project for about a year I guess. I gather they are employees of a computer museum. Absolute geniuses!