Apollo Guidance Computer

[Dan]

Randy Dawson wrote:
> There is the ocasional homebuilt, TTL CPU thread on here.  I wanted to make known this guy, John Plutorak, who reproduced the guidance computer in his basement:
>
> http://klabs.org/history/build_agc/
>
> Awsome project, take a look.  I intend to build one too...
>   
I've seen this before and it's very interesting.

Here's a piece of trivia I picked up while researching material for my 
last project at VCF east about Floating Point Math. I talked with Frank 
O'Brian, the caretaker of the Apollo Guidance Computer exhibit at 
InfoAge in NJ about this subject. He provided this tidbit of info that I 
thought I could share here. While looking at the original code listings 
for this computer, (at the exhibit) it's quite amazing how they 
accomplished all this math within such a constrained environment given 
the technology of it's day. I feel this would make some people scratch 
their heads :)

What type of arithmetic operations were used to perform all the 
calculations on the Apollo Guidance Computer ?
a) Floating Point arithmetic operations
b) Fixed Point Arithmetic operations
c) Integer Arithmetic operations
d) Slide Rule Arithmetic operations
e) all of the above



=Dan

[ Pittsburgh 250th --- http://www2.applegate.org/~ragooman/   ]