How did NASA steer the Saturn V?
 

Pretty incredible what they did with technology back in the 60's.

All 5 F1 engines had a large (considering) amount of gimble. Pretty impressive for 1.5 million pounds of thrust each.

"By hand..."

:Jeff '79: or :banghead:

I'll say amazing.

Man, thanks for posting this! The Saturn V was an amazing engineering accomplishment for sure.

A lot of intelligent and skilled people back then. And the proof is in the success of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs.:cert:

My dad worked on the F1 engines for Rocketdyne.

The center engine was fixed, only the outer four were on gimbals.

I love this stuff. I knew the ring housed the computers and that the computing power was somewhat primitive, but I had no idea how much labor and precision went into it.

Thanks for posting this!! :seasix: :seasix:

And we threw it all away for social programs.

That’s probably extremely interesting if you understood even a LITTLE of it. I superglued my shoe this morning.

At one of my old jobs, we had a PDP-1104 minicomputer that had core memory similar to this computer. It was used to test cable assemblies and was programmed by Hughes Aircraft. I remember when the guy who primarily ran it was all excited because they got him a hard disk drive. The thing was the size of big suitcase and had removable platters, each about the size of an LP record arranged in a stack of six or so. I think it was 5 MB total storage. Prior to that everything had to run from 8" floppy disks. :lol:

At one point I built a small PC and added special controller board that was essentially just a bunch of relays and programmed it to be a tester to replace this behemoth. Took me a week or two and done. Last I heard they are still using it 30 years later.

We had a system all the way up till 1996 that still used the large 14" platter disks in the Army/Air Force. It controlled spacecraft. :yesnod:

It's amazing how some unlicensed Software Engineers could do so much with so little. :yesnod:

I have one of those platters - I made a wall clock out of it. :D

After first divorce, I moved into my hi rise 11th floor apt.....looking out over top of NIH, where the kid's mom worked.....it was really interesting in that the Nat. Lib of Med was into Bio-Medical .com around the world even china and russia on board with the sat links and so down in the basement to get to the lunch room, we walked by the large IBM transports, setting there spinning away, very similar to the tape machines that Library of Conngress was operating, around the world sat links sharing library information......

so during that time period from '76 through '88 I observed a lot of expansions in the Dig IT ALL world.......:dance::dance::seasix:

Great stuff. Had my AIT school not far down the road from the rocket center at Redstone Arsenal. Cool place to visit.:cert:

pics???

i still have the Fortran code i wrote in college..... :leaving: :dance: :DAB:

My kid's G'father on their Mom's side was a EE doing Fortran coding at his house in N Carolina Oriental town, off the Neusse River.....his company chased him down upon retarrment and move south....beCAUSE he was the only dude that knew jack shit about some project or other....early 80's......he more interested in maintaining his home built 34' Morgan Sail boat....not that I blame him one damn bit.....:sadangel:

he should tell them: "fine, i'll drop what i'm doing in my pleasant retirement to help you out. my fee is $500/hour, if i have to travel, it's by first class, you pay all actual expenses, including pay for travel time, and i don't do more than 6 hours a day without prior approval by me, and then each hour over 6 is charged at $800/hour. now, what can i help you with?"

I think I still have my Fortran IV manual!