Brian Swiderski hasn't been posting much to his new blog, but when he does, it's fairly meaty and lengthy.

Ending Blogfare works. BS is living proof.

I'd appreciate it if people wouldn't bash Brian here, since he can't respond. Go over to his place and comment, if you feel a need.

I am not bashing him at all Rand.

Quite the contrary, I am noting how much more productive and worthwhile he has been since you curbed his incoherent excesses here.

The problem with the bit about for profit not being about the space citizens is that the fat cats who finance space settlement are likely to be on site or at least the fat-cat tourists who provide the money for the profit.

The trouble with funding by losses is you need someone else to write the check.

LOL "Meaty and lengthy"

While I understand the amusement, believe me, it was entirely unintentional. My description was based purely on the read, and on no other data...

I switched off at Brian's "you are reading this sentence on a machine made possible by the Apollo program"... which is about as conclusively, demonstrably, many-times-proven wrong as a statement can be.

Having been at some pains to explain that to him on several occasions, and watched it roll right off, and seeing him recycle it yet again... no, I don't think I'll "go over to his place and comment."

Couldn't care less about his politics: what space advocacy doesn't need from left, right, or any other angle is more bogus arguments like that. Wishful thinking offered as fact is a lousy foundation for anything.

I switched off at Brian's "you are reading this sentence on a machine made possible by the Apollo program"... which is about as conclusively, demonstrably, many-times-proven wrong as a statement can be.

Now I would normally be one of the last to defend Brian but he does have at least a partial point. The flight computer of the lunar module was an incredible work of engineering and software art. (Lets see could Microsoft or Apple design a real time multitasking Operating System that directly executed assembly code typed in by astronaut, running a landing radar, communications, real range rate calculations all in 16k of memory?)

Sorry but in the embedded systems and computer systems design business whoever did that design and the software that ran on it is right up their close to Jesus in my mind.

This goes for the chips as well. There was an incredible meteoric rise in the complexity of systems designs in the 60's brought about by the incredible amount of money spent on Apollo as well as the ICBM programs. For example, in 1961 95% of all design articles still used tubes with a smattering of transistors in a few areas. Transistors generally had really poor noise figures and tubes were far superior. I have been studying the designs of late 50's infrared spectrometers and there were very few circuit boards even, just point to point wiring!

If you go to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in Washington and walk in on the Mall side one of the first things you see is part of the guidance system of the Minuteman missile. There is a Texas Instruments 5400 series ceramic package integrated circuit with a date code late in 1963, virtually one of the first off the production line (that production line was paid for by NASA and the USAF). By 1970 the entire 7400 series was available for both commercial and military uses (those with long memories as an engineer can remember the water absorption problem with the first generation TI plastic packages).

It was these chips that transformed the world. Everyone waxes poetic about the 4004 CPU from Intel but without the 7400 series of IC's none of the low cost minicomputers would have ben possible (DEC, Datapoint, and many others). It was the Datapoint 3300, which used 7400 series ALU's shift registers, and other chips that was rendered into a big chip, now known as the 8080, which was the CPU that went into the Altair, that gave Billy Gates a purpose in life. It was the 6502 Chip from Motorola, normally used in the Sidewinder missile, that gave Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak their purpose in life.

On top of all of this, it was the highly trained technical and management work force of the Apollo era that filtered from NASA and DoD (After Vietnam), that formed the core of the engineering and middle management for a great part of Silicon Valley and Southern California computer industry in the 70's. Heck most of the engineers at Intel were trained at Fairchild, a huge defense contractor in the semiconductor industry.

One of these days a book needs to be written that weaves these connections between Apollo and Silicon Valley into a coherent story.

it was the highly trained technical and management work force of the Apollo era that filtered from NASA and DoD...

...Heck most of the engineers at Intel were trained at Fairchild, a huge defense contractor in the semiconductor industry.

In other words, the claim that we wouldn't have microcomputers today without Apollo holds no water.

I actually broke down and followed the link to Brian's site. Good lord do all DailyKos writers talk down at mere humans like that? Other than the Apollo comment he got about 99.5% of the things that he talks about wrong.

I actually broke down and followed the link to Brian's site. Good lord do all DailyKos writers talk down at mere humans like that? Other than the Apollo comment he got about 99.5% of the things that he talks about wrong.

Rand

...Heck most of the engineers at Intel were trained at Fairchild, a huge defense contractor in the semiconductor industry.

In other words, the claim that we wouldn't have microcomputers today without Apollo holds no water

Do you always have to be so figging literal? Fairchild provided chips to everyone and the lines between defense contractors and NASA has always been fictious for the most part.

You did not even pay attention to the part about the LM computer. Read man read.

Do you always have to be so figging literal?

It's not a question of being literal. Unless it is your claim that the line would not have existed without Apollo (that is, the demand for chips for Apollo was huge, and the demand for defense applications so small that they couldn't justify the investment, when in fact it was obviously the other way around), then the claim that we had to have Apollo to get microcomputers remains ludicrous. It would have happened without Apollo. Period.

You did not even pay attention to the part about the LM computer. Read man read.

Dennis, you assume the LM would not have been built without Apollo.

The lunar module originated as the Gemini "bug." When NASA HQ finally accepted that Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (also a Gemini invention) would work, they were not about to let Gemini do it, so they transferred the "bug" to Apollo.

If Apollo hadn't existed, the Gemini team might have been allowed to continue lunar landing development work, with similar computer requirements.

Also, if Apollo didn't exist, the USAF might have been allowed to continue development of the X-20 DynaSoar and related programs, which would have had computer requirements of their own.

For all we know, DynaSoar might have led to a computer that was even more advanced than the LM's.

I'm soon we'll soon here about how NASA is developing very advanced computers for Orion and how many spinoffs will result. The implication will be that without Orion, there would be no advances at all. In actual fact, without Orion, the money would be spent on something else, which would produce its own spinoff benefits. That's the problem all the "spinoff" arguments. They only look at one side.

Ed it does not matter, it was done, it took a LOT of money to develop and if there is one thing that I have learned in entreprenural space or any other arena is that without bucks, the best ideas in the universe are going no where. It does not matter what may or may not have happened with DynaSoar, which McNaMara made the decision that anything other than reconissance and communications was destablizing in the era of MAD and therefore had to be curtailed. The military space program was castrated at that moment.

Apollo was what happened and the LM computer should be recognized as one of the milestone computers of the entire computer age.

I make no implications toward Orion at all Ed, I don't think that the current implementation is going to have an iota's worth of advanced tech and that is the way that NASA wants it today. In 1964 NASA and Grumman did good in the engineering of the Apollo system and that is why today's NASA does not really seek to go beyond it except for some updating but as anyone knows the computers in spacecraft today are several generations behind the state of the art in performance.

There is a moral in there somewhere.

Ed it does not matter, it was done, it took a LOT of money to develop and if there is one thing that I have learned in entreprenural space or any other arena is that without bucks, the best ideas in the universe are going no where. It does not matter what may or may not have happened with DynaSoar, which McNaMara made the decision that anything other than reconissance and communications was destablizing in the era of MAD and therefore had to be curtailed. The military space program was castrated at that moment.

Apollo was what happened and the LM computer should be recognized as one of the milestone computers of the entire computer age.

I make no implications toward Orion at all Ed, I don't think that the current implementation is going to have an iota's worth of advanced tech and that is the way that NASA wants it today. In 1964 NASA and Grumman did good in the engineering of the Apollo Lunar Module system and that is why today's NASA does not really seek to go beyond it except for some updating but as anyone knows the computers in spacecraft today are several generations behind the state of the art in performance.

There is a moral in there somewhere.

I am having hard time following the spill-over course from Apollo too. Isn't it the case that Intel's microporcessors originated from a demand for desktop calculators (by Casio, IIRC)? So, we wouldn't be using these machines if Japanese used an in-house design instead of outsourcing to those Americans... or whatever other silly statement we would like to make here.

It does not matter what may or may not have happened with DynaSoar, which McNaMara made the decision that anything other than reconissance and communications was destablizing in the era of MAD and therefore had to be curtailed. The military space program was castrated at that moment.

Dennis, remember the atmosphere of the time. It was possible for McNamara to do that only because Kennedy said Apollo was going to save us from the Soviet Union. Without that political cover, there's no way he could have cancelled DynaSoar and survived. He would have been seen as giving outer space to the Soviets.

In 1964 NASA and Grumman did good in the engineering of the Apollo system and that is why today's NASA does not really seek to go beyond it except for some updating but as anyone knows the computers in spacecraft today are several generations behind the state of the art in performance.

Actually, Jim Chamberlain and McDonnell Douglas did a much better job on Gemini than Rockwell did on Apollo. Gemini was actually a third-generation capsule. It was conceived after Apollo development had already started (although it flew before Apollo because it was developed faster). As a result, its designers were able to incorporate lessons from both Mercury and Apollo. Gemini was the astronauts' favorite capsules; Apollo was considered a lemon by comparison.

NASA didn't choose to recreate Apollo because it had the best engineering, but because it had the best PR.

Ed

I am talking about the LM computer, not the Command or Service module. Grumman built the LM computer.

I am having hard time following the spill-over course from Apollo too. Isn't it the case that Intel's microporcessors originated from a demand for desktop calculators (by Casio, IIRC)? So, we wouldn't be using these machines if Japanese used an in-house design instead of outsourcing to those Americans... or whatever other silly statement we would like to make here.

Pete

The production lines for semiconductors, the original Medium Scale Integrated circult (MSI) were built for providing 5400 series chips for the military and NASA in the early 60's. The chips that failed military qualification but still functioned, were placed in a plastic package and sold on the commercial market. That is where 7400 series TTL logic chips originated. Without 7400 series logic chips (AND, OR, NOR, NAND) gates, none of the calculators or early computers would have functioned. It takes more than a CPU to run a computer.

A lot of the Intel 4004 chips ended up in red lights across the country as a major early customer of that chip.

While the Intel 4004 and 8008 were in house designs, the 8080, which is the CPU that began the microcomputer revolution was a contract job that Intel did for Datapoint, to reduce the chip count of the Datapoint 3300 computer. After the project was completed Datapoint was not interested anymore and Intel was free to market the chip to the market.

Dennis, remember the atmosphere of the time. It was possible for McNamara to do that only because Kennedy said Apollo was going to save us from the Soviet Union. Without that political cover, there's no way he could have cancelled DynaSoar and survived. He would have been seen as giving outer space to the Soviets.

It happened and MacNamara used MAD as the excuse due to the destabilizing nature of manned military spaceflight. It is an interesting read and I was actually shocked when I found this out. I found out when researching my chapter on military space power theory.