integrated circuits were only invented a couple years before the Apollo moon missions started in 1961
imagine an alternate timeline where that didn't happen, could moon landing have even happened with vacuum-tubes? highly unlikely
integrated circuits were only invented a couple years before the Apollo moon missions started in 1961
imagine an alternate timeline where that didn't happen, could moon landing have even happened with vacuum-tubes? highly unlikely
Not sure if you've seen this video about how the Apollo computers were made, but it's really fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndvmFlg1WmE
(They also anachronistically refer to women as girls which feels weird nowadays.)
I think it would have been more likely to be some kind of mechanical analog computer full of gears and cams (which some planes and missiles did use for guidance). Probably needing more support from the ground.
Apollo did carry tubes also, in the radio transmitters.
In between IC's and vacuum tubes, isn't there discrete transistor logic?
Yes.
During the time of the Apollo project, from 1964 to 1969, the fastest computer of the world was CDC 6600, which was made with discrete transistors (and which greatly annoyed IBM, because a much smaller company had been able to make computers faster than theirs; the main designers of CDC 6600 had been Jim Thornton and Seymour Cray, who later became well known for the Cray supercomputers).
Integrated circuits became ubiquitous only during the late sixties.
btw this is what IC chips looked like during Apollo
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_ci...
This is how they looked after removing the top of their package, not how they looked inside the computer.
This is how the silicon die looked like, with the ten bonded gold wires that went to the pins of the package.