Sun City Center Computer Club
Meeting Presentation

Computers To The Moon

   How did the United States manage to get humans to the moon in the 1960s at a time when PCs didn't exist and computers were the size of a small warehouse?
   Computers to the Moon tells the story of computers aboard early U.S. spacecraft, leading to the monumental and little-known effort to create a computer capable of landing a spacecraft on the moon.
   From our highly-technical society today, it’s easy to look back half a century and believe that a real spacecraft computer was impossible. Before the Apollo program, such a thing didn’t exist. But the history of the pioneering Apollo Guidance Computer demonstrates that ingenious, motivated, dedicated engineers and software developers, even half a century ago, could accomplish amazing things. In Computers to the Moon, you'll learn what they created, how it worked, how the astronauts used it, and get a glimpse of what how the computer managed a real moon landing.

 

Your presenter is Mark Shulman