[HN Gopher] A transistorized shift register box, built in 1965 f...
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A transistorized shift register box, built in 1965 for Apollo
testing
Author : parsecs
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-06-16 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.righto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.righto.com)
| kens wrote:
| Author here for all your questions about obscure Apollo hardware
| :-)
| jetrink wrote:
| Do you think that this device was entirely bespoke or do you
| think that the designers adapted another design (perhaps a
| commercial product)?
| kens wrote:
| This device seems specific to its particular task. I wonder
| about the strange construction technique of pseudo-
| integrated-circuits on mini PCBs. It's hard to imagine that
| Control Data would come up with that specifically for this
| device. If I come across any other CDC systems that use the
| same technique, it will be informative.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| Probably it was done to save down time in the event of a
| failure, if something happened you'd just replace the
| affected module instead of the whole test box or to match
| certain characteristics, you build several modules and use
| the ones with similar parameters.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but they really did need such extreme
| measures against humidity etc then, right? The components we have
| today are better sealed, the materials are less likely to be
| affected by humidity, etc etc. Years of marginal improvements in
| epoxies mostly I think.
| kens wrote:
| One of the testing documents describes the problems they had
| with corrosion, so it was a genuine problem. Part of the
| solution was more air conditioning, and the other part was
| making the units more resistant to humidity. Keep in mind that
| they were on the Florida coast, so there was a lot of humidity
| and salt.
| anonymousisme wrote:
| Perhaps this was the inspiration for Boundary Scan (IEEE-1149.1)
| also known as JTAG.
| lolc wrote:
| What strikes me about a unit like that is how it's just a small
| part in an undertaking where thousands of similar components had
| to be ready and interoperable within the decade.
| kens wrote:
| Yes, it's like fractal levels of complexity. This box is a
| small part of the system to test a small part of a subsystem
| that's a small part of the Moon landing, but even this one
| piece is complicated, and had pages and pages of
| specifications.
| jsrcout wrote:
| I always think of building a system of this complexity as
| building a pyramid where each block is its own entire
| pyramid.
| kens wrote:
| What you're describing is the fractal Sierpinski pyramid
| :-)
|
| Picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sierpinski
| _pyramid.p...
| mulmen wrote:
| In my day job I do data pipeline development and operations. That
| involves a bunch of AWS services and some custom wrappers we
| developed in-house. I spend a lot of time clicking around in web
| interfaces.
|
| Recently I have fantasized about what it would be like to operate
| my environment with something like the ACE control room.
|
| Need to set a flag on some Spark option? That's literally a
| switch. Is something on fire? Look for a flashing red light. Need
| to send the output of a task to some other process? That's a
| knob.
|
| I think about this both in terms of literally making a control
| panel/room or a web interface equivalent.
|
| A control room seems like something that needs a lot of
| forethought and deep understanding. How would that requirement
| along with the difficulty of pushing changes influence the design
| of a web interface?
|
| Recently Ken obtained and shared some of the Roto-Tellite
| switches from mission control. Is that the 1960's version of
| jQuery?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You can forget automation then :)
| mulmen wrote:
| Why? Apollo was automated. The LEM could land itself. The
| control room just... controls.
|
| Why can't my control room have a "backfill" station that
| takes inputs for begin and end date and dispatches that to
| the correct system?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > The LEM could land itself
|
| No, really it couldn't. Someone had to reset all those 1201
| alarms while manually hovering it down to a boulder free
| site
| kens wrote:
| To be serious, the Apollo testing was a combination of
| manual, semi-automatic, and automatic. You could program
| tests into the minicomputer and trigger them with a "start"
| button in the control room. The computer would carry out the
| steps for the test, check for parameters that were out of
| bounds, and display these on a CRT in the control room.
| Meanwhile, you could see other parameters on the gauges and
| chart recorders. So it was more advanced than you might
| expect.
|
| It replaced a system where you'd radio a guy at the rocket
| and tell him to switch things on and off, and he'd tell you
| what happened. Needless to say, that was pretty unreliable.
| anoncake wrote:
| No, you need to build a button pushing robot then.
| thehappypm wrote:
| You'd love Simulink.
| stadium wrote:
| Investing in centralized logging and alerting can give you the
| raw data for your dashboarding vision. I'd start there.
| mulmen wrote:
| I already have logs, alerts and dashboards.
|
| I want a _control panel_. Complete with blinkenlights and
| switchgear that goes "click" and has satisfying detents.
| ksaj wrote:
| I believe the current interest in Arduino, Raspberry Pi
| Pico, Mini SAM, and the like is because of an interest in
| how things worked when they were simpler and more
| mechanical. Especially since they allow for easy cross-
| breeding of modern computing with something more analog on
| a bread board or pHAT with any sensor configuration you can
| imagine.
|
| It sounds like you would find some comfort in and around
| these devices.
| dsnuh wrote:
| I made a little joke project a while back called
| "Keytarnetes" which used a MIDI controller (in this case a
| keytar from a Guitar Hero set) to run various actions
| against a Kubernetes cluster when you pressed the keys. It
| was really simple to hack together in a night using the
| mido python library. I basically just had a folder with
| shell scripts named after the notes and a process that
| polled for new keypresses and executed the script with the
| same name when that note that was pressed on the keytar.
| Maybe something like that could work for you?
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