America's biggest mistake

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 7:55:06 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d7085918-1568-4c57-a38e-4068f192b0e6@googlegroups.com:

I'd love to hear one that would justify the enormous cost,
especially when we are already running massive deficits,

You are so fucking stupid, you cannot even keep the past and the
present separated. Back then, there was a cold war and a space race,

The issue was going back to the moon, the cost and whether it's justified,
not past history, stupid.

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:39:02 -0500, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:

America's biggest mistake was landing on the moon 50 years ago. This was
the start of satellites, which lead to the cell phones. Now we have a
generation of idiot "cell tards". (Kids addicted to cellphones who have
no real lives).

That was an expensive mistake, but it didn't create satellites. It
actually didn't create much of anything.

America's biggest mistake was slavery.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d75ce3b1-7916-4d51-bde0-9635d1eb87be@googlegroups.com:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 12:15:27 AM UTC-4,
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:b7441221-ca6f-4855-9876-6a8ca887ce95@googlegroups.com:

IBM was using transistors, the iconic 360 line was introduced
in 1964, 5 years before the moon landing and obviously IBM was
working on the 360 for years before that. So was Sperry Rand:

You are about as stupid as it gets.

Mainframes computers back then had no ICs in them because the
ICs
did not exist yet.

I did not say that any computers had ICs in them at the time the
US started the Apollo program. However you posted this whopper:

"IBM was using tubes and that was not going to cut it on the
moon."

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

You do a good job of googling but only prove you have no actual
been around to see it knowledge.

You are a fat assed punk, at best. I doubt that you are even
30
years old. Your eleven year old mental age is sure glaring.


This from the guy who posted:

"IBM was using tubes and that was not going to cut it on the
moon."

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

In fact IBM, Sperry Rand, DEC, etc were producing computers using
transistors when the Apollo program started.

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

And there were two
different concepts for the Apollo guidance computer at the time,
one using ICs the other an IBM design using discrete components.

There were more players considered than just those, dipshit.

> The two were evaluated and hotly debated.

Oh boy! "hotly debated"! Wow.

No one was saying the
IBM design could not be used,

Plenty were. In fact they got tossed early on.

in fact it was favored by many
because it was a proven design,

Not for mission guidance it wasn't.

> while ICs were new and uncertain.

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

> Wrong, always wrong.

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

 

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:2cd1e43f-a13e-4901-944c-ba045463b6cf@googlegroups.com:

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 7:55:06 PM UTC-4,
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d7085918-1568-4c57-a38e-4068f192b0e6@googlegroups.com:

I'd love to hear one that would justify the enormous cost,
especially when we are already running massive deficits,

You are so fucking stupid, you cannot even keep the past and
the
present separated. Back then, there was a cold war and a space
race,

The issue was going back to the moon, the cost and whether it's
justified, not past history, stupid.

No. That was not the issue. That was something *you* injected into
the thread, idiot.

 

trader4@optonline.net wrote in news:ba3931b7-6e94-433f-b4e6-
3a5af6fee578@googlegroups.com:

"IBM was using tubes and that was not going to cut it on the moon."

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.

 

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:129255d9-78d1-435e-ada5-23eda0ea79d2@googlegroups.com:

IBM design, primarily in that it was proven,
it was used in ICBMs and the Saturn V, and a more reliable choice
than going with ICs, which had just started to become available.
Particularly of note, those responsible for the evaluation
did not say the IBM design could not be used because of size,
weight, etc.

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

 

trader4@optonline.net wrote in news:129255d9-78d1-435e-ada5-
23eda0ea79d2@googlegroups.com:

NASA in particular
is an absurd assertion, because Kilby was already working on his IC
before NASA even existed.

Kilby and his Ge IC had NOTHING to do with it, idiot.

I never said he did.

 

[dcaster@krl.org]

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 9:18:49 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

The ic's that TI were silicon, not Germanium.

https://anysilicon.com/history-integrated-circuit/

The first integrated circuit made by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958 was made with germanium. The first practical integrated circuits were made with silicon at Fairchild, using their newly invented planar process.

The Germanium ic was a proof of concept. But the first ic commercially available made by TI was Silicon.

"Fairchild went forward and created IC chips for use in the Apollo spacecraft which went to the moon. It was this program along with using chips for satellites that spread the IC from military applications to the commercial market. It also lowered the price of the IC drastically which made it perfect for use in many electronic devices."

The Space Program had very little to do with making ic's. The oil industry used more computers than the Space Program.

Not a particularly relevant observation.

Only relevant in that the oil companies actually bought considerable more computers than the space program.

The launch computer for the moon shot was a RCA 110a. The RCA 110 was made to control drilling rigs. The 110A was a modified 110. The mod was to add 7 more banks of memory. The RCA 110A had 8 memory banks each bank was 8 k of 24 bit words. The memory was mag core memory.

So much for NASA pushing the development of the state of the art. The Computers used transistors , not tubes or ic's.

The launch computer stayed on the ground. It's size and mass didn't matter much.

THe launch computer was also very slow. It had a 1 megacycle clock and was a 24 bit serial computer. So the fastest instruction time was 24 microseconds with most instructions taking considerable more time.
Dan

The mass of the gear that went into orbit did need to be minimised.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 12:11:58 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

trader4@optonline.net wrote in news:b7441221-ca6f-4855-9876-
6a8ca887ce95@googlegroups.com:

Yet they had a solid state computer in 1953.

Apples and oranges.

There are no 2 ton computers on any spacecraft.

The IC chip made it possible to make a computer small enough to be
part of the payload of a spacecraft.

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.

 

[George Herold]

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 10:40:06 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:39:02 -0500, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:

America's biggest mistake was landing on the moon 50 years ago. This was
the start of satellites, which lead to the cell phones. Now we have a
generation of idiot "cell tards". (Kids addicted to cellphones who have
no real lives).


That was an expensive mistake, but it didn't create satellites. It
actually didn't create much of anything.

America's biggest mistake was slavery.
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.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d75ce3b1-7916-4d51-bde0-9635d1eb87be@googlegroups.com:

In fact IBM, Sperry Rand, DEC, etc were producing computers using
transistors when the Apollo program started. And there were two
different concepts for the Apollo guidance computer at the time,
one using ICs the other an IBM design using discrete components.
The two were evaluated and hotly debated. No one was saying the
IBM design could not be used, in fact it was favored by many
because it was a proven design, while ICs were new and uncertain.

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]

 

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 11:11:51 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d75ce3b1-7916-4d51-bde0-9635d1eb87be@googlegroups.com:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 12:15:27 AM UTC-4,
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:b7441221-ca6f-4855-9876-6a8ca887ce95@googlegroups.com:

IBM was using transistors, the iconic 360 line was introduced
in 1964, 5 years before the moon landing and obviously IBM was
working on the 360 for years before that. So was Sperry Rand:

You are about as stupid as it gets.

Mainframes computers back then had no ICs in them because the
ICs
did not exist yet.

I did not say that any computers had ICs in them at the time the
US started the Apollo program. However you posted this whopper:

"IBM was using tubes and that was not going to cut it on the
moon."


It is true.

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....



>A heavy computer was not an option. Wake the fuck up.

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.

Oh and that included the current crop of 'solid state' versions back
then.

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

You do a good job of googling but only prove you have no actual
been around to see it knowledge.

You are a fat assed punk, at best. I doubt that you are even
30
years old. Your eleven year old mental age is sure glaring.


This from the guy who posted:

"IBM was using tubes and that was not going to cut it on the
moon."


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

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

In fact IBM, Sperry Rand, DEC, etc were producing computers using
transistors when the Apollo program started.

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

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

And there were two
different concepts for the Apollo guidance computer at the time,
one using ICs the other an IBM design using discrete components.

There were more players considered than just those, dipshit.

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.

The two were evaluated and hotly debated.

Oh boy! "hotly debated"! Wow.


No one was saying the
IBM design could not be used,

Plenty were. In fact they got tossed early on.

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

in fact it was favored by many
because it was a proven design,

Not for mission guidance it wasn't.

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)

while ICs were new and uncertain.

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

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.


http://www.wylie.org.uk/technology/computer/ICs/monolith/monolith.htm

Since TI and Fairchild were the co-inventors of the IC, you might expect that 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 price for the first announced TI chip, the SN502, and Khambata states unequivocally that "In 1960, Texas Instruments announced the introduction of the earliest product line of integrated logic circuits. TI's trade name is 'Solid Circuits' for this line. This family, called the series 51, utilized the modified DCTL circuit...". Finally, "Electronic Design" magazine announced the Texas devices in March 1960,and Fairchild prototype chips in November 1960.


Wrong, always wrong.

 

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 10:13:06 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
<gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 10:40:06 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:39:02 -0500, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:

America's biggest mistake was landing on the moon 50 years ago. This was
the start of satellites, which lead to the cell phones. Now we have a
generation of idiot "cell tards". (Kids addicted to cellphones who have
no real lives).


That was an expensive mistake, but it didn't create satellites. It
actually didn't create much of anything.

America's biggest mistake was slavery.
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.)

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.

George h.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

lunatic fringe electronics

 

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:01:44 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 2:55:18 PM UTC+10, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jul 2019 16:25:37 -0700 (PDT), trader4@optonline.net wrote:

On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 6:33:10 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:65def308-d7b4-49b1-b0f8-faf53920bc42@googlegroups.com:

The classic Bell Labs paper on cellular mobile telephony doesn't
say anything about satellite links -

That's because motorola developed it.
They started in 1946.

AT&T 'conceived' of it (actual cell based telephony), but they went
nowhere with it.


Wrong, always wrong. Motorola demonstrated the first HANDHELD mobile phone.
AT&T, Bell Labs were always major players in mobile, starting after WWII
and evolving into
cellular service. That first Motorola handheld in the 70s was not an
actual cellular based phone at all, it did not use cells. It
was AT&T, that supplied most of the cellular base station eqpt as
actual cellular service later deployed in the USA. The first deployment
was AMPS, developed at Bell Labs. And following the
breakup of AT&T, the eqpt part of AT&T and Bell Labs became Lucent Technologies
and they went on to dominate the cellular base station field. Today
merged with Alcatel, they are still a significant player, probably larger
than Motorola, though both of them have lost share to all the new players.

When exactly does a radiotelephone network become a cellular network ?

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 number of channel has always been limited so the base stations
have to reuse the channels at say 100 km distance from each other.

Does a radiotelephone network become cellular, when two mobile units
in different areas can communicate with each other through leased land
lines ?

The principle of a cellular network is that adjacent cells always use slightly different frequencies,

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.

and the transmitted power is adjusted so that non-adjacent cells re-using a given frequency don't interfere with the closest nonadjacent cell using the same frequency.

The moving phone keeps track of enough frequencies to know when to switch switch from the fixed station in one cell to the fixed station in the nearest neighbour cell.

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

The idea of cycling through a limited collection of frequency bands is the central feature of cellular networks.

Is a manual/automatic connection to the general landline telephone
network required?

It is built-in. The mobile phone talks directly to the station at the centre of the nearest cell which sets up a - mostly landline - connection to the telephone at the other end of the call.

Must the base station automatically command the mobile station to use
the minimum power required to perform the communication, in order to
minimize spillover to nearby cells?

That would seem to be an essential capacity. Cell sizes are limited both by the range that can be covered by the transmitter power capacity built into the mobile part, and the number of mobile phones active with a particular cell.

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.

Country cells are a lot bigger than inner-city cells.

 

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 12:19:09 AM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:b7441221-ca6f-4855-9876-6a8ca887ce95@googlegroups.com:


Noyce and Kilby had independently invented the first IC in 1959,
that's before there was a space program.


No, idiot. It was AFTER NASA began.

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 Kilby to military customers.[33] While most divisions rejected it as unfit to the existing concepts, the US Air Force decided that this technology complies with their molecular electronics program,[33][45] and ordered production 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 device created within the molecular electronics program – a radio receiver.[47] It uses costly ICs, which had less than 10–12 components and a high percentage of failed devices. This generated an opinion that ICs can only justify themselves for aerospace applications.[50] However, the aerospace 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.

 

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 12:57:08 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d75ce3b1-7916-4d51-bde0-9635d1eb87be@googlegroups.com:

In fact IBM, Sperry Rand, DEC, etc were producing computers using
transistors when the Apollo program started. And there were two
different concepts for the Apollo guidance computer at the time,
one using ICs the other an IBM design using discrete components.
The two were evaluated and hotly debated. No one was saying the
IBM design could not be used, in fact it was favored by many
because it was a proven design, while ICs were new and uncertain.


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.

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

"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.

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

guidance computer led and motivated integrated-circuit technology,
[63] it was the Minuteman missile that forced it into mass-
production.

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

States Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated
circuit market in 1962,

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

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]

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?

 

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 17:45:16 +1000, Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 22/7/19 3:15 pm, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:
On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 11:03:30 +1000, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:


And GPS is just the Apollo ranging system (which I described in another
thread today), turned upside-down, with relativistic calculations to
locate the birds, and triangulation to compute the position.

The ranging system used in Apollo is now known as two way ranging and
is used in all planetary probes these days.

While GPS also uses PRN codes, it is essentially a one way system.


They didn't have an atomic clock on the Apollo, nor a ground computer
capable of the relativistic calculations needed.

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.

The downlink was
frequency locked to the uplink to cancel the doppler effect on ranging,
so relativity didn't need to be accounted for.

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

That's immaterial - using an uplink is just another way of getting the
spacecraft to send a reliable signal, plus it doubles the resolution.

Clifford Heath.

 

[Lasse Langwadt Christense]

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

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 10:13:06 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 10:40:06 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:39:02 -0500, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:

America's biggest mistake was landing on the moon 50 years ago. This was
the start of satellites, which lead to the cell phones. Now we have a
generation of idiot "cell tards". (Kids addicted to cellphones who have
no real lives).


That was an expensive mistake, but it didn't create satellites. It
actually didn't create much of anything.

America's biggest mistake was slavery.
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.)


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

US military budget is 700 billion

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 10:13:06 -0700 (PDT), George Herold
<gherold@teachspin.com> wrote:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 10:40:06 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:39:02 -0500, tubeguy@myshop.com wrote:

America's biggest mistake was landing on the moon 50 years ago. This was
the start of satellites, which lead to the cell phones. Now we have a
generation of idiot "cell tards". (Kids addicted to cellphones who have
no real lives).


That was an expensive mistake, but it didn't create satellites. It
actually didn't create much of anything.

America's biggest mistake was slavery.
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.)

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

 

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 11:03:49 -0700 (PDT), trader4@optonline.net wrote:

On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 12:57:08 PM UTC-4, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
trader4@optonline.net wrote in
news:d75ce3b1-7916-4d51-bde0-9635d1eb87be@googlegroups.com:

In fact IBM, Sperry Rand, DEC, etc were producing computers using
transistors when the Apollo program started. And there were two
different concepts for the Apollo guidance computer at the time,
one using ICs the other an IBM design using discrete components.
The two were evaluated and hotly debated. No one was saying the
IBM design could not be used, in fact it was favored by many
because it was a proven design, while ICs were new and uncertain.


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.

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



"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.

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
guidance computer led and motivated integrated-circuit technology,
[63] it was the Minuteman missile that forced it into mass-
production.

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
States Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated
circuit market in 1962,

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
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]


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?

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