America's biggest mistake

snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Ummm... No. ICBMs did not use an IBM computer, nor did the Redstone Saturn V booster.

snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news:ba3931b7-6e94-433f-b4e6- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

They were, and I did not say that was all they were using. My point was merely that they were not using chips, but you and your retard crew took it as if I declared that was all they were using.

Nice try, chump.

You are a true idiot.

snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

It is true. A heavy computer was not an option. Wake the f*ck up. Oh and that included the current crop of 'solid state' versions back then.

You get hung up on stupid shit and think it makes you look smart. You fail, child.

Room sized business computers were not an option. You need to wake the f*ck up, child.

There were more players considered than just those, dipshit.

Oh boy! "hotly debated"! Wow.

Plenty were. In fact they got tossed early on.

Not for mission guidance it wasn't.

ICs were non existent and were custom made for the purpose.

Nice try. You are thick skulled, always thick skulled.

snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You are a guess as you google asshole. You would not even be posting your stupid shit were it not for the manned Moon missions.

"SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and aerospace projects helped inspire development of the technology. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems. Although the Apollo guidance computer led and motivated integrated-circuit technology, [63] it was the Minuteman missile that forced it into mass- production. The Minuteman missile program and various other United States Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U.S. Government spending on space and defense still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production.

The demand by the U.S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow IC firms to penetrate the industrial market and eventually the consumer market. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in

1968.[64] Integrated circuits began to appear in consumer products by the turn of the 1970s decade. A typical application was FM inter- carrier sound processing in television receivers.

The first MOS chips were small-scale integration chips for NASA satellites.[65]

I'll agree with that!

Re: Apollo, I read in the paper that for a few years we were spending something like 2% of GDP on the moon program. (I had no idea it was that big.)

George h.

Wrong again. There were two competing design proposals for the Apollo guidance computer. One was developed at Draper Labs, based on NOR gate ICs. The other was an IBM proposal using discrete semiconductor technology, similar to what went into military ICBMs and the Saturn V. It was close, the IBM design had the advantage that it was proven and no one was saying that it could not work. NASA decided to go with the Draper design.

Wrong, always wrong.

No, it's a lie. At the time the Apollo program began, new computers had been using transistors, not tubes, for a long time. Companies like IBM, Sperry Rand, DEC....

No shit Sherlock. So why did you bring up tubes when computers for everything from commercial application to military were already using transistors? You brought it up because you're wrong, always wrong.

That's a lie as evidenced by the use of discrete transistor computers for the Titan ICBMs and the Saturn V guidance systems.

It was your stupidity, not mine or anyone else here. Even your butt buddy Bill has told you that you're wrong.

Not just larger business computers, but also the computers for the Titan and Saturn V guidance systems, designed and supplied by IBM.

Sure, a few posts ago you thought computers were still using vacuum tubes at the start of the Apollo program. So much for who's the dipshit, dipshit.

That's a lie, which is why you can't supply any names or specifics, while I can.

It was proven capable and reliable for guiding the Titan ICBM. And it was chosen and used in the Saturn V, dipshit. Both were IBM supplied, using discrete semiconductors. (not vacuum tubes)

Wrong again, always wrong. Kilby and Noyce had both independently built the first ICs in 1959. In 1960 TI and Fairchild had already announced their first commercial ICs. The Apollo program didn't start until 1961.

Since TI and Fairchild were the co-inventors of the IC, you might expect th at they would release the first commercial devices, and in fact this was so . In some places on the Web the Fairchild 900 series is credited with being the first to market, in 1961, but the documented evidence does not support that: the Chip Collection gives a very specific date of March 1960 and pri ce for the first announced TI chip, the SN502, and Khambata states unequivo cally that "In 1960, Texas Instruments announced the introduction of the ea rliest product line of integrated logic circuits. TI's trade name is 'Solid Circuits' for this line. This family, called the series 51, utilized the m odified DCTL circuit...". Finally, "Electronic Design" magazine announced t he Texas devices in March 1960,and Fairchild prototype chips in November 19

Wrong, always wrong.

You do not need an atomic clock nor relativistic corrections to use two-way ranging. The only requirement is that you have a stable clock from the transmission to reception. For lunar missions, the clocks needed to be stable for about 2.5 s, for Voyagers a one day stable period is required.

With 5.5 MHz PRN chip clock, the length of one chip is 54 meter. To get decimeter accuracy you need to be able to measure the phase difference between Tx and Rx chip pulse to an accuracy about 1 degree, which requires a quite good SNR.

You do not want to cancel doppler, since you want to measure it to determine the radial speed. Now you have the absolute distance using the PRN code and radial velocity from doppler and using orbital mechanics, you can quite accurately calculate the current and predicted position without knowing the sideway position or tangential velocity.

The downlink was locked to the uplink by using a coherent transponder

You provide no cite for where what you quoted came from and you're calling me names?

Sure, lighter is better, but Titan ICBM and the Saturn V both used IBM designed discrete logic computers, so discrete designs were obviously light enough to work. If it wasn't then the Apollo team would not have been considering a similar IBM design for the Apollo guidance system.

Although the Apollo

No one is denying that both the military and NASA were important customers that helped get IC and a lot of other technology advanced faster. But even without it, IC technology would have advanced on it's own.

The Minuteman missile program and various other United

When you have a link that goes back to a source, we can check that out and maybe see if it's true or another exaggeration.

and by 1968, U.S. Government spending on

Do you think all the computer manufacturers would have just continued to use discrete transistor logic, when ICs became avaiable? They switched from tubes to transistors, even though they were expensive initially too, didn't they? Sure, ICs were expensive, but mainframe computers were selling for what would be tens of millions of dollars today, which would justify the cost/benefit. Again, not saying that the military and NASA were not an important part of the demand, that they accelerated the technology, but do you honestly think we would have no cell phones, no TVs, no personal computers today, if not for the military and NASA?

I meant to say before there was an Apollo program.

Here is what wiki has to say about TI and Kilby's development:

In autumn 1958, Texas Instruments introduced the yet non-patented idea of K ilby to military customers.[33] While most divisions rejected it as unfit t o the existing concepts, the US Air Force decided that this technology comp lies with their molecular electronics program,[33][45] and ordered producti on of prototype ICs, which Kilby named "functional electronic blocks".[46] Westinghouse added epitaxy to the Texas Instruments technology and received a separate order from the US military in January 1960.[47]

In October 1961, Texas Instruments built for the Air Force a demonstration "molecular computer" with a 300-bit memory based on the #587 ICs of Kilby.[

48][49] Harvey Kreygon packed this computer into a volume of a little over 100 cm3.[48] In December 1961, the Air Force accepted the first analog devi ce created within the molecular electronics program ? a radio recei ver.[47] It uses costly ICs, which had less than 10?12 components a nd a high percentage of failed devices. This generated an opinion that ICs can only justify themselves for aerospace applications.[50] However, the ae rospace industry rejected those ICs for the low radiation hardness of their mesa transistors.[46]

In April 1960, Texas Instruments announced multivibrator #502 as the world' s first integrated circuit available on the market.

IT's quite remarkable that if NASA was the driving force in the creation of the IC, that neither TI nor Fairchild says so in their history. TI has the process as Kilby invents, then they took it to the Air Force and showed it to them.

There has been a lot of discussion who "invented" the cellular network. In order to answer this, one needs to have a common conception what a "cellular" network is. This is why asked.

The only network I know of using such tricks is the VHF Band I analog TV-network with visual carriers offseted by multiples of fH/12. This helped in avoiding Sporidic-E interference from TV-stations from South Europe.

Sure in a cellular phone network, one cell site could use even channel numbers while the adjacent cell used odd channel numbers.

It should be noted that the service area is much smaller than the area in which interference from other cells can occur. For this reason you can't use the same channel in adjacent cells, you at least have one cell between cells before reusing the same channel numbers. This was the case at least in any analog network.

Yes, handover. but also roaming from country to country as in the Nordic NMT network in early 1980's.

There was a snag in the original NMT450 mobile phone network specification. Base station could only command the mobile station down to 1 W, which means a quite large cell size. With growing popularity, all channels were exhausted in city centers, forcing the introduction of NMT900 many years earlier than originally intended with low power handheld phones.

A TV documentary that I saw last week claimed that NASA consumed 4 % of the US GDP.

Apparently the current US military spending is also 4 % of GDP.

Some observation about the DDP x16 minicomputer originating from the

1960's. Later models were build with small PCBs the size about two credit cards. There was just one or at most two flat-pack ICs on one or both sides of the PCB.

Clearly the PCBs in the original version had contained discrete gates but in later versions replaced by ICs with same functionality, but the PCB form factor was not changed :-)

NASA's budget is now 21 billion. We could do some serious space science and aeronautics if we canned the absurd manned flight programs.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

mandag den 22. juli 2019 kl. 21.06.48 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

US military budget is 700 billion

Yup, I'd love to see a mission that sent a robot sub out to which ever of Jupiter's moons has water inside. (I guess that's Europa)

It seems like the pace of technological change has slowed down. (well expect for computers/ Moore's law.) 50 years since the moon shot and how much different are rockets today? (except for 'puters inside.) or my car, or washing machine... etc. George H.

That's my point. GPS is built on accurate ranging that was developed during Apollo. I never said it didn't need more to make it work, just that it extended that. Do you disagree?

Apollo used a 992KHz clock, but it must have had You do not want to cancel doppler, since you want to measure it to

I said the wrong thing. Synthesising Tx from Rx signals doubles the Doppler effect. On approach, the receiver sees a higher frequency, so the transmitter sends a higher frequency, which is further compressed by return Doppler. The radial speed (from ranging) could be used to separate Doppler shifts from oscillator drift.

Right - brilliant stuff! I think you get the departure hyperbola, but not the lateral (3rd) dimension though. Not sure how they got that, but it's less important.

When A13 fired for TEI they had to guess somewhat at the spacecraft mass (not knowing what was left after the explosion), and had over-estimated it, so it wound up aimed at the Indian ocean instead of the south Atlantic as they'd hoped. Stan Anderson was given four days to get his "Snoopy" tracking planes into the area to sight the splashdown, which was more than enough time. The incidence angle was dangerously low at

2.6 degrees; anything below 3 degrees risked bouncing off, but it worked out ok. Stan talked about all this with us over the last weekend.

Clifford Heath.

America's biggest mistake was not to repulse the white European invaders.

We were told it peaked about 4%. The 400,000 people involved was about

2% of the population. No wonder there was social unrest.

Clifford Heath.

There is only one solution. Plonk him.