Rope Memory
Posted by Tyler Muth on February 27, 2009
I watched the Discovery Science series “Moon Machines” a few weeks ago, as I’m pretty much obsessed with all things space or flying. In the “Navigation Computer” episode, there was a section about the memory they used for the Apollo machines that I found fascinating. They actually sent their programs off to a factory to have them woven into a “rope” of 1’s and 0’s!!! This makes punch-cards look convenient.
Check out the video on YouTube from about 3:00 to 6:00 min:
ittichai said
That is amazing. It is unimaginable to think that the 72KB memory of the Apollo’s guidance and Navigational system could accomplish the job. I’ve watched similar Discovery episode saying that there was issue with memory overload (error 1202) during the halfway through its final 12-minute burn that would land them safely on the moon. But they’d decided to ignore error and land it anyway.
Thanks.
Ittichai
Tyler Muth said
Yeah, the 1202 was due to the fact that Neil Armstrong turned on the rendezvous radar just in case they had to abort and return to the command module. The computer was overloaded with data from both the landing radar and the rendezvous radar. You can understand his reasoning, but next time I would stick to the check-list
Louis-Guillaume Carrier-Bédard said
Tyler,
Thanks for sharing!
L-G
Kaili said
First blog I read after wakeup from sleep today!
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Bill Zantow [BillZ} said
The “Rope” name came from an original Instrumentation Lab concept of using a Jaquard Loom[used to make clothing labels] to weave a “rope” of cores. It never worked. Weaving even ten wires turns into an immovable object after a few cycles. The final version of the “Rope” had 196 wires approach each magnetic core. A wire passing thru the core represented a “one”[or a zero] and a wire bypassing a core made a “zero”[or a one]. The final version consisted of cores in a planer array. The plane was mounted in “Y,Z” NC machine. Each core that needed a wire was presented to the operator who then threaded the particular sense wire thru it.–etc,. etc– Very exspensive but very reliable The final product was most like brick!!!————–BillZ