When the strike was over, every module the supervisors had wired was scrapped.This kind of computer memory was called “rope core memory,” because it ended up looking like collections of densely bundled ropes made of wires. Some programmers nicknamed the finished product By the standards of the time, a relatively large amount of data could be stored in a small installed volume of core rope memory: 72 kilobytes per cubic foot, or roughly 2.5 megabytes per cubic meter. The "core rope" memory, which is the type used for program storage in the Apollo Guidance Computer, is implemented by having the sense or drive winding bypass specific cores. When they learned that they had to be done months in advance, says MIT’s Ramon Alonso, who helped invent the programming logic for the Apollo computer, “The reaction was, ‘What? The software to fly to the Moon was hardwired into the computer. It couldn’t be accidentally erased or altered by an astronaut or a technician, or by an electrical problem. So when NASA astronauts rapidly approached the moon 50 years ago, a lot was riding on a computer with less than 80 kilobytes of memory. And the mesh that made it possible? The memory holding the programming for a single Apollo flight computer—for the entire mission—was a total of just 73 kB, far less than the memory many emails require today. By the time U.S. lunar modules starting landing on the Moon, the technology had moved on to the much easier to handle—and much cheaper—computer chips and floppy disks that dominated computing for the next several decades.So the Apollo flight computer was not only the first computer of any significance to use handwoven rope core memory. This was about 18 times the amount of data per volume compared to standard read-write core memory: the Block II Apollo Guidance Computer used 36,864 sixteen-bit words of core rope memory (placed within one cubic foot) and 4,096 words of magnetic core memory (within two cubic feet). (In this blog post, I'll discuss just the erasable core memory.) With testing and then moving the computers to the spacecraft at the Cape, that meant a flight’s software had to be finished and perfect many months before the flight. The AGC had very little memory by modern standards: 2048 words of RAM in erasable core memory and 36,864 words of ROM in core rope memory. Both types are discussed fully below. On spaceships where keeping the weight down was a constant battle, that was indispensable.The only problem was that it required an eight-week manufacturing lead time. Yet it took dozens of women in Waltham eight weeks to assemble it, meticulously, by hand.Raytheon set up a dedicated group just to weave Apollo computer memory, and the company found out how just how hard the task was. It was made of piano wire—woven by hand.When the Apollo spacecraft floated down to the Pacific Ocean on three distinctive orange and white parachutes, each one 83.5 feet across and 7,200 square feet of material—bigger than the floor space in two homes—all the sewing was done by hand, by women at black Singer sewing machines. But here’s the thing: That didn’t slow anyone down. ... the hardware by hand — it was called "core rope memory." Turning clockwise to indicate a "1" or anti-clockwise indicating a "0". Here is a video showing how Francois Rautenbach extracted the original software from the rope memory modules of AS 202, the first Saturn V flight and the first computer using integrated circuits. The memory in Block II consisted of a segment of erasable core and six modules of core rope fixed memory. Core rope memory is a form of read-only memory (ROM) for computers, first used in the 1960s by early NASA Mars space probes and then in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) designed and programmed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Instrumentation Lab and built by Raytheon.. Software written by MIT programmers was woven into core rope memory by …
The 16-bit words were generally 14 bits of data (or two op-codes), 1 sign bit, and 1 parity bit. The cycle time was 11.7 micro-seconds. )Just as important, in the mid-1960s, in the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors, and from transistors to early computer chips, handwoven rope core memory was far and away the densest computer memory available. (In a frightful test of this, Apollo 12 was launched into a bank of rain clouds and was promptly struck by lightning twice in the space of 16 seconds just after leaving the launch pad at Cape Kennedy; the spaceship’s flight computers were undamaged. The core rope ROM modules (which we don't have) 2 would be installed in the empty space on the left If the lunar rover wheels had to be woven by hand, so be it.If the internals of the Apollo computer itself needed to be hand sewn, so be it.And so, like the lunar rover wheels and the parachutes, the circuits and programs of the Apollo flight computers were also woven by hand, by women at a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts.
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