The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was a digital computer produced for the Apollo program that was installed onboard each Apollo Command Module (CM) and Lunar Module (LM). The AGC provided computation and electronic interfaces for guidance, navigation, and control of the spacecraft. The AGC had a 16-bit word length, with 15 data bits and one parity bit. Most of the software on the AGC was stored in a special read only memory known as core rope memory, fashioned by weaving wires through magnetic cores, though a small amount of read-write core memory was provided.
Astronauts communicated with the AGC using a numeric display and keypad called the DSKY. The AGC and its DSKY user interface were developed in the early 1960s for the Apollo program by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. The AGC is notable for being one of the first integrated circuit-based computers.
Read more about Apollo Guidance Computer: Operation, Design, Block II, PGNCS Trouble, 00404 Error Code, Applications Outside Apollo
Famous quotes containing the words apollo, guidance and/or computer:
“blue bead on the wick,
there’s that in me that
burns and chills, blackening
my heart with its soot,
I think sometimes not Apollo heard me
but a different god.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Now narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficently over others; they go the way their nature guides them. Add to this the guidance of interest, and you will have the key to most social riddles.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)