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Nate Cull

meanwhile the Gemini Guidance Computer team laugh

"you MIT people had 4K of RAM, we had 39 whole bits AND WE WERE GRATEFUL"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_G

28 May 2018 at 23:18 | Open on mastodon.social
9 comments
Nate Cull

ah, actually they did have 4096... 36-bit words of writeable core RAM. Weird. Was the Gemini computer *bigger* than the Apollo one ????

ibiblio.org/apollo/Gemini.htp

28 May 2018 at 23:26 | Open on mastodon.social
Nate Cull

The Apollo LVDC is the third computer on the ship that never gets any love cos it just ran the engines and wasn't sexy

ibiblio.org/apollo/LVDC.html
28 May 2018 at 23:29 | Open on mastodon.social
Nate Cull

<< and the MIT Instrumentation Labs' antibodies flooded in to destroy the invader with critiques and reports negative of the IBM report. >>

lol programmers then just like today

28 May 2018 at 23:30 | Open on mastodon.social
Nate Cull

Ah! The LVDC had no ROM at all! Good lord. The entire program sat in RAM. Aaaaaaaaaaaa

28 May 2018 at 23:34 | Open on mastodon.social
Nate Cull

<< A so-called "bugger word" has been stuck at the end of each bank—no comments on this terminology, please, since I didn't invent it; when I asked Don Eyles some question that involved them, he somewhat-laconically stated "we called them check sums">>

ibiblio.org/apollo/index.html

28 May 2018 at 23:42 | Open on mastodon.social
Nate Cull

Huh, and if you have ROM and RAM I guess it literally is a Harvard Architecture

ibiblio.org/apollo/BlockIII.ht

I never thought of that before!

29 May 2018 at 0:00 | Open on mastodon.social
Mans R

@natecull Not necessarily, or even typically. It is quite common to have both code and read-only data in ROM while using RAM for read/write data. RAM can also be used to hold code loaded from some type of storage that doesn't permit direct execution.

31 Oct 2022 at 15:23 | Open on society.oftrolls.com
nilrog

@natecull I’m going to use “bugger word” instead of checksum from now on 😁

5 Jan 2023 at 8:25 | Open on mastodon.nu
transvestic infohazard

@natecull buzz kill.. was in the middle of crylaughing at the though of the US sending two people into space with 39 bits keeping them alive

4 Jan 2023 at 12:09 | Open on aus.social
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