Apollo Guidance Computer History ProjectSecond conferenceSeptember 14, 2001
Herb Thaler's introductionHERB THALER: I got involved in the Apollo project by way of sort of a back door. I was working for Raytheon and attached to the Instrumentation Lab on the Polaris project as a resident. Shortly after that petered out a little bit, I became reattached as a resident on the Apollo program in the computer group. Just putting things in context, I was just all of three years out of school. So not what you'd call really tremendously experienced in computer design. But got into the computer group and was doing work with Ramon and Dr. Hopkins, Dave Shansky to go ahead with the Mars computer. At then shortly after arriving, the concept of the integrated circuit arose. I remember meeting in Eldon Hall's office where we all gathered around and tried to determine which direction the group ought to go as far as implementing either with the Mars circuit technology, the core transistor logic or the integrated circuit approach and all of the issues that that was going to raise. And the decision was made to go ahead with the integrated circuit approach. Of course none of us knew what an integrated circuit was at that time. I ended up with the responsibility of reimplementing the Mars design in the integrated circuit world and carried that through. It's a very interesting computer design. Many levels of interrupt. I remember words like pink, mink, shink and shank for essentially instantaneous reaction to requests from resolvers and synchros and communication links and things like that, and the multi-structured level of interrupts and software levels of hierarchy.
I also remember a fateful day in 1963 sitting in the Apollo computer lab which was a big room and then a little room behind it. I was in the little room behind it with the first brass board Apollo computer prototype. I was debugging it when the word came that Kennedy was shot. That was kind of a real seminal moment. I think everybody became particularly re-energized to make this project work. That was my role. I did a little bit of programming when the design was finished to some orbital calculations. But my role was primarily in the design of the hardware. Organization of the AGC project site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown |
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