The optimism of scientists in those days was so refreshing, I also found it amusing to see how their predictions for the future played out so far. Thanks for posting the video. It was certainly a nice trip down memory lane.
I remember watching this films like this in summer school on film projector in the late '80s. The building was built in the 1930's, had no air conditioning and when it was too hot to be upstairs we'd be brought down into the basement and shown films like this. They knocked that school down a couple of years later. In that school's life it saw the birth of computers and the internet. Seeing films like this reminds me of the musky smell of a cool basement.
Primarily feeding the algorithm, but also... Thank you. I'm basically a child of the space age, having been born the same year that Sputnik 1 launched. I was only 3 years old when this movie was released, but I grew up obsessed with the manned missions pretty much from the age of 6 (so 1963) on up. So wonderful to see some of the early history that was happening before I was aware of it.
Thanks again. Glad you enjoyed this. I can understand and share your obsession with early manned space missions. The 1960's were an exciting time without a doubt. I felt a real loss when they downsized NASA... The Space program helped keep many people focused on space and the future, with a sense of hope. ~ Victor
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject I imagine clean rooms weren't needed because of the lack of precision in the instrumentation. A peice of dust wont hardly effect being on the inside of an electronic device back in the 50s just because how large and imprecise the electronics were then. Relative to today's electronics
I was born in 57, and this technology is amazing for the time, I may be a few years older now, and things have moved on at an alarming rate, So I say, good luck to the future generations of space explorers. I will not be here.But I wish you luck all the same, For without exploration, we are dead. be here,
I was born in 58; I was old enough to appreciate the early Moon probes and the Manned landings. Then had to wait 50 years for SpaceX to happen; to jump start Mars again, that I hope we both will see in what remains of our lives. BTW Who on Earth downvoted this!!!
What an outstanding video! I am 64 years old and I can appreciate vintage educational films such as this. They are not at all obsolete! Keep in mind, the new technology had to come from somewhere. Please reply. Dave...
Hi @daveridgeway2639, thank you very much for your feedback on the NASA Computers video! I am glad that you appreciate films like this! It is a main focus of ours to help research, restore and make available vintage material like this, to help share the historical background to many of our technologies in use today. Your feedback is appreciated. Hope you will continue to explore our channel! ~ Thanks again. Victor, CHAP
"Produced in Association with WGBH Cambridge, Mass." The music for the film was composed by a very notable local musician and composer in the Boston area. Check out the acknowledgements and participants in the production. It"s almost like an episode of _Nova_ before there was _Nova_ .
this so amazing how much was accomplished with basic technology... waste no computer logic and work with devices like the slide rule... even today this film is a great learning aid..😀
Those early failures in the American space program proved that we weren't ready. Many people were upset about the Soviets beating us in space and the _Sputnik_ satellite made Americans paranoid about Soviet domination in space and other sciences.
This is one of the big advantages of many community ("junior") colleges. The JC I attended owned an IBM 1130 mainframe for engineering, science and math, and a System 3 for more generalized work. Not only were students allowed direct hands-on access of those computers, it was required. Meanwhile, the state college allowed no such student use of their computers. Yet the cost of transferable lower division units at the junior college was quite less, compared to that of the state college. The ONLY thing that I thought was superior at the state college, was the dorm food. For quality lower division, in my opinion, JC is where to be!! Or at least it was back-in-the-day when I attended.
I was 7 when Sputnik launched, old enough to remember it well. I recall my elders expressing concern that the Russians beat us to space. The race was on!
While US was second place in putting satellite into orbit, it was the first to discover the radiation belts and named after the PI, Van Allen. I read that it was first puzzling of changes in radiation during the orbits (too lazy to find a source, I'm sure it is out there). After much analyzing (yep, bunch of guys with slide rules, pencil and paper, and smoking cigarettes) it was then determined to be areas of particles trapped in earth's magnetic field. I may later trace that down to find out how long it took, what was their first impression reviewing the data. This film also showed telemetry data is not like what we have now where everything is conveniently labeled with units. It's all noise making squiggly lines on long sheets of paper. Ugh, there probably was times when the paper ran out during a pass, or plenty of paper but the pen went dry or someone forgot to turn on the feed button. Ah, the wonders of human foibles among modern space age technology. James Van Allen born in 1914, died in 2006. Imagine getting to participate and witness so much of the space program! I also read Soviets could have been first to detect these belts of radiation, story from a book or webpage is a satellite tape recorder failed. I remember the article mentioned they wanted to do additional tests prior to launch but the engineer for the recorder insisted it is guaranteed to work.
Interesting info. Never thought about the pen running out of ink during the recording phase. I guess they'd have to have someone in charge of monitoring and replacing the pens, or lose valuable data! ~ VK
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject In those days pretty much everything was new, never done before, so lots of things can go wrong. Years ago, I attended a management class that had an older engineer and program manager who worked on early programs such as Ranger. That had all sorts of problems but noticed these days failures that can doom missions are infrequent. This guy said it is heritage of experience.
PLEASE JOIN US in Preserving Computer History with a small contribution to our channel. www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LCNS584PPN28E Your contribution greatly helps us continue to bring you educational, historical, vintage computing topics. Thank you! ~ Computer History Archives Project
After having multiple replies disappear, I'll try one last time and post this information as a new comment: It seems the number in the movie of 10,000 tons per day of cosmic dust was wrong. NASA's current estimate for cosmic dust landing on Earth is more like 14 tons per day (they say 5200 tons per year). And the European Space Agency estimates that about 100 tons (90 metric tons) of atmosphere escape into space each day. So Earth's mass is apparently decreasing by about 86 tons per day.
What are you asking? Did early rockets and satellites have guidance systems? Yes. What did they use to determine position? Mostly gyroscopes and sun/star trackers.
E.g. gyroscopes made of plywood. Ingenious inventions which made the V2 rocket ( ancestor of all liquid fuel space rockets) operational. Interesting facts about that are written in the book "Peenemünde West" . Greetings.😁
But it was very interesting nonetheless ... and by 1960, we found out via the deep-space satellites that the moon wasn't made of green cheese. Oh well ...
An easy lookup and some calculator math says it would have no measurable effect at all. Wikipedia gives the mass of the Earth as 5.97-something times 10 to the power of 24 (10**24) kilograms. That converts to approximately 65,808,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.5808 X 10**22) tons. 10,000 tons a day for a billion years adds up to around 3,652,500,000,000,000 (3.652 X 10**15) tons. Which would add less than 0.000006% to the mass of the earth.
The two dishes in the foreground are probably early to mid-WWII U.S. Navy radar antenna dishes for a large ship like a battleship or aircraft carrier. I've seen photos of smaller dishes of the same style built for both the U.S Army and Navy during WWII. The heavy duty yoke mount is typical for the U.S Navy.
@@dalecomer5951 Have a look at the German Würzburg Riese, it looks quite identical to the dishes in the movie. Look at the support of the dish grid. It also had a yoke mount, but that might not have been reused. I cannot see that.
@@typograf62 The large Würzburg dish is similar in size and shape but the detail structure of the dish and mount is quite different. There is a section in the Wikipedia article on the Würzburg radars about post-war use and there is no mention of any being used by the U.S. The U.S. Navy SK-2 was used through most of WWII on aircraft carriers and is about the same size as the two dishes in the film. However, the more I look it seems probable that those dishes are post-war designs.
I've had two replies to other comments deleted (so far) for no reason I can figure out. This comment is a test to see if it also gets deleted. (Edit - obviously, it didn't get deleted)
I find if I try to include links then my comments get deleted within 20 seconds, this happened after I posted a link about Covid. RUclips censorship!!!
@@favesongslist Thanks for the feedback. I thought that might have had something to do with the first one that got deleted, but I made sure that my second reply didn't have any links in it, and it disappeared as well.
Hi Canadian RobJ, just to chime in here, YT can remove comments before we even see them. I don't know what their criteria are for doing that. (It is probably an AI application that does that for them).
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Appreciate the chime :) I always assumed it was a bot doing the deleting. I did search the YT FAQs, and all they suggest is that it might've been routed to the creators 'possible spam' folder. But even they say they can't predict what might cause a post to be flagged as spam like.
YT will sometimes delete all comments I make, even if it's just a test letter. Then it'll start allowing them again. I used to think I was being censored, but since it's sporadic it may just be a glitch.
Where would films like this typically have been shown? Movie theaters as pre-shows? Television as a special? I'm trying to get a sense of what the general public's exposure would have been to content like this. Thanks!
Hi Aaron, great question. This particular film, we believe, would have been shown to multiple types of audiences. It was produced for the National Academy of Sciences and was part of an educational program for the IGY (International Geophysical Year, 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958) educational programs. If you "google" the IGY, you will see why films of this type were important during that time period. It would have been shown publicly as wall as to educational institutions. It would have received wide exposure, during that time period, but would become out of date technically within just a few years, as U.S. and Soviet space programs accelerated in the 1960's. Thanks for asking. Others have probably wondered the same. ~ Victor, at CHAP
Brings back memories. The IBM704 was the first computer I wrote a program for in Fortran II.
punch cards?
@@wrightmf Absolutely! Drawers full of them!
@@KaliferDeil Same here.
How many people remember the "frequency" keyword in Fortran II on the 704?
The optimism of scientists in those days was so refreshing, I also found it amusing to see how their predictions for the future played out so far. Thanks for posting the video. It was certainly a nice trip down memory lane.
Hi Jimmyturpin, thank you for the kind words. Glad you liked it. ~ Victor
I remember watching this films like this in summer school on film projector in the late '80s. The building was built in the 1930's, had no air conditioning and when it was too hot to be upstairs we'd be brought down into the basement and shown films like this. They knocked that school down a couple of years later. In that school's life it saw the birth of computers and the internet. Seeing films like this reminds me of the musky smell of a cool basement.
It's really interesting to see the Soviet achievements mentioned as equally important to the US's in a film of that era.
Primarily feeding the algorithm, but also... Thank you.
I'm basically a child of the space age, having been born the same year that Sputnik 1 launched. I was only 3 years old when this movie was released, but I grew up obsessed with the manned missions pretty much from the age of 6 (so 1963) on up. So wonderful to see some of the early history that was happening before I was aware of it.
Thanks again. Glad you enjoyed this. I can understand and share your obsession with early manned space missions. The 1960's were an exciting time without a doubt. I felt a real loss when they downsized NASA... The Space program helped keep many people focused on space and the future, with a sense of hope. ~ Victor
We have a lot to thank those engineers for. Very interesting film, Thank you.
Very interesting to see the electronic components being assembled for the early satellites.
Hi PM, and it doesn't look like they used "clean rooms" for much of the assembly, but perhaps it wasn't as critical at that time. ~ VK
Yes, Very hobby ish with the flannel shirts and bare hands
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject
I imagine clean rooms weren't needed because of the lack of precision in the instrumentation. A peice of dust wont hardly effect being on the inside of an electronic device back in the 50s just because how large and imprecise the electronics were then. Relative to today's electronics
I was born in 57, and this technology is amazing for the time, I may be a few years older now, and things have moved on at an alarming rate, So I say, good luck to the future generations of space explorers. I will not be here.But I wish you luck all the same, For without exploration, we are dead.
be here,
I was born in 58; I was old enough to appreciate the early Moon probes and the Manned landings.
Then had to wait 50 years for SpaceX to happen; to jump start Mars again, that I hope we both will see in what remains of our lives.
BTW Who on Earth downvoted this!!!
Thank you !
You are very welcome! ~
What an outstanding video! I am 64 years old and I can appreciate vintage educational films such as this. They are not at all obsolete! Keep in mind, the new technology had to come from somewhere. Please reply. Dave...
Hi @daveridgeway2639, thank you very much for your feedback on the NASA Computers video! I am glad that you appreciate films like this! It is a main focus of ours to help research, restore and make available vintage material like this, to help share the historical background to many of our technologies in use today. Your feedback is appreciated. Hope you will continue to explore our channel! ~ Thanks again. Victor, CHAP
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProjectOh absolutely!
Fascinating film. Thank you for uploading. 👏👏👏👏👏👏
Glad you enjoyed it.
WOW what an awesome video TY so much for up loading.
This is a great introduction to 'Why Space'
Hi Timothy, Glad you enjoyed it! ~ Victor
"Produced in Association with WGBH Cambridge, Mass." The music for the film was composed by a very notable local musician and composer in the Boston area. Check out the acknowledgements and participants in the production. It"s almost like an episode of _Nova_ before there was _Nova_ .
this so amazing how much was accomplished with basic technology... waste no computer logic and work with devices like the slide rule... even today this film is a great learning aid..😀
I'm glad that Soviet achievements were duly acknowledged in this film, despite the cold-war mentality of the era.
The control station looks very analog back then
I loved 23:43 where the observers ducked down during the rocket launch
I love these old films.
Спасибо! Очень интересно!
(trans: "Thanks! Very interesting!") Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it!
Those early failures in the American space program proved that we weren't ready. Many people were upset about the Soviets beating us in space and the _Sputnik_ satellite made Americans paranoid about Soviet domination in space and other sciences.
Not ready but inexperienced. The soviets were just lucky. Our program was transparent to the world. The soviets, not so much.
This is one of the big advantages of many community ("junior") colleges. The JC I attended owned an IBM 1130 mainframe for engineering, science and math, and a System 3 for more generalized work. Not only were students allowed direct hands-on access of those computers, it was required. Meanwhile, the state college allowed no such student use of their computers. Yet the cost of transferable lower division units at the junior college was quite less, compared to that of the state college. The ONLY thing that I thought was superior at the state college, was the dorm food. For quality lower division, in my opinion, JC is where to be!! Or at least it was back-in-the-day when I attended.
Hi Carl, a very interesting observation, thanks very much! ~
Great stuff .
Glad you enjoyed it.
I was 7 when Sputnik launched, old enough to remember it well. I recall my elders expressing concern that the Russians beat us to space. The race was on!
I thought this was about IBMs computer
In the 50's, things slowed up instead of down.
17:00 So the earth is pear shaped. Cool.
For each extra pound of satellite weight 7.5 pounds of rocket were needed NOT hundreds.
6:18 it's insane that today this looks like automotive garage quality at best, and would be completely unacceptable in modern space engineering
It is truly amazing what they could do back in those early years! ~
If you told them that one day multiple "computers" would be launched into space, that's just crazy talk, what a laugh!
While US was second place in putting satellite into orbit, it was the first to discover the radiation belts and named after the PI, Van Allen. I read that it was first puzzling of changes in radiation during the orbits (too lazy to find a source, I'm sure it is out there). After much analyzing (yep, bunch of guys with slide rules, pencil and paper, and smoking cigarettes) it was then determined to be areas of particles trapped in earth's magnetic field. I may later trace that down to find out how long it took, what was their first impression reviewing the data. This film also showed telemetry data is not like what we have now where everything is conveniently labeled with units. It's all noise making squiggly lines on long sheets of paper. Ugh, there probably was times when the paper ran out during a pass, or plenty of paper but the pen went dry or someone forgot to turn on the feed button. Ah, the wonders of human foibles among modern space age technology.
James Van Allen born in 1914, died in 2006. Imagine getting to participate and witness so much of the space program!
I also read Soviets could have been first to detect these belts of radiation, story from a book or webpage is a satellite tape recorder failed. I remember the article mentioned they wanted to do additional tests prior to launch but the engineer for the recorder insisted it is guaranteed to work.
Interesting info. Never thought about the pen running out of ink during the recording phase. I guess they'd have to have someone in charge of monitoring and replacing the pens, or lose valuable data! ~ VK
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject In those days pretty much everything was new, never done before, so lots of things can go wrong. Years ago, I attended a management class that had an older engineer and program manager who worked on early programs such as Ranger. That had all sorts of problems but noticed these days failures that can doom missions are infrequent. This guy said it is heritage of experience.
PLEASE JOIN US in Preserving Computer History with a small contribution to our channel. www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=LCNS584PPN28E Your contribution greatly helps us continue to bring you educational, historical, vintage computing topics. Thank you! ~ Computer History Archives Project
We used to think that the earth is pear shaped?
gravity makes it wider at the bottom
"And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped."
"This new science amazes me, Bedevere."
@@k1ross Ni!
Everything is so ho hum these days. Those days were truely groundbreaking.
5:41 they clearly didn't use enough struts ;)
After having multiple replies disappear, I'll try one last time and post this information as a new comment:
It seems the number in the movie of 10,000 tons per day of cosmic dust was wrong. NASA's current estimate for cosmic dust landing on Earth is more like 14 tons per day (they say 5200 tons per year). And the European Space Agency estimates that about 100 tons (90 metric tons) of atmosphere escape into space each day. So Earth's mass is apparently decreasing by about 86 tons per day.
Indonesia mana suaranya
Guidance systems ? how
What are you asking? Did early rockets and satellites have guidance systems? Yes.
What did they use to determine position? Mostly gyroscopes and sun/star trackers.
E.g. gyroscopes made of plywood. Ingenious inventions which made the V2 rocket ( ancestor of all liquid fuel space rockets) operational. Interesting facts about that are written in the book "Peenemünde West" . Greetings.😁
This video has almos nothing to do with an IBM 704.
But it was very interesting nonetheless ... and by 1960, we found out via the deep-space satellites that the moon wasn't made of green cheese. Oh well ...
10,000 tons of microparticles every day, how does that affect gravity over time?
An easy lookup and some calculator math says it would have no measurable effect at all.
Wikipedia gives the mass of the Earth as 5.97-something times 10 to the power of 24 (10**24) kilograms. That converts to approximately 65,808,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6.5808 X 10**22) tons.
10,000 tons a day for a billion years adds up to around 3,652,500,000,000,000 (3.652 X 10**15) tons. Which would add less than 0.000006% to the mass of the earth.
i would suspect, more mass = stronger gravity. dont think anything that low can escape earths gravity pull. so we as a planet are getting heavier
@@RottnRobbie plus the amount of mass that earth loses every day from its atmosphere!
@@bgbthabun627 minus not plus :)
What a great video so glad I watched it.
At 17:27 looks very much like reused German radar dishes.
That is an interesting observation! Thanks! ~ Victor
The two dishes in the foreground are probably early to mid-WWII U.S. Navy radar antenna dishes for a large ship like a battleship or aircraft carrier. I've seen photos of smaller dishes of the same style built for both the U.S Army and Navy during WWII. The heavy duty yoke mount is typical for the U.S Navy.
@@dalecomer5951 Have a look at the German Würzburg Riese, it looks quite identical to the dishes in the movie. Look at the support of the dish grid. It also had a yoke mount, but that might not have been reused. I cannot see that.
@@typograf62 The large Würzburg dish is similar in size and shape but the detail structure of the dish and mount is quite different. There is a section in the Wikipedia article on the Würzburg radars about post-war use and there is no mention of any being used by the U.S. The U.S. Navy SK-2 was used through most of WWII on aircraft carriers and is about the same size as the two dishes in the film. However, the more I look it seems probable that those dishes are post-war designs.
To the moon
2019 U S A
I've had two replies to other comments deleted (so far) for no reason I can figure out. This comment is a test to see if it also gets deleted.
(Edit - obviously, it didn't get deleted)
I find if I try to include links then my comments get deleted within 20 seconds, this happened after I posted a link about Covid. RUclips censorship!!!
@@favesongslist Thanks for the feedback. I thought that might have had something to do with the first one that got deleted, but I made sure that my second reply didn't have any links in it, and it disappeared as well.
Hi Canadian RobJ, just to chime in here, YT can remove comments before we even see them. I don't know what their criteria are for doing that. (It is probably an AI application that does that for them).
@@ComputerHistoryArchivesProject Appreciate the chime :)
I always assumed it was a bot doing the deleting. I did search the YT FAQs, and all they suggest is that it might've been routed to the creators 'possible spam' folder. But even they say they can't predict what might cause a post to be flagged as spam like.
YT will sometimes delete all comments I make, even if it's just a test letter. Then it'll start allowing them again. I used to think I was being censored, but since it's sporadic it may just be a glitch.
What would Elon say? Thanks
Where would films like this typically have been shown? Movie theaters as pre-shows? Television as a special? I'm trying to get a sense of what the general public's exposure would have been to content like this. Thanks!
Hi Aaron, great question. This particular film, we believe, would have been shown to multiple types of audiences. It was produced for the National Academy of Sciences and was part of an educational program for the IGY (International Geophysical Year, 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958) educational programs. If you "google" the IGY, you will see why films of this type were important during that time period. It would have been shown publicly as wall as to educational institutions. It would have received wide exposure, during that time period, but would become out of date technically within just a few years, as U.S. and Soviet space programs accelerated in the 1960's. Thanks for asking. Others have probably wondered the same. ~ Victor, at CHAP