“It was… the first digital flight computer, the most advanced miniature computer to date, the first computer to use silicon chips, and the first onboard computer where the lives of crew depended on it functioning as advertised.”
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Really interesting article. I worked at Raytheon on a device that connected to this computer and we had one for that project. One interesting tidbit that the author didn’t highlight is that there was only 1 kind of chip, a package with 2, 3 input nor gates. Now this computer did computations that required moving data into and among registers. But if you needed a register you had to make it up from flip flops that you made up from at least 2 of the gates, usually more if the register had some special requirement. Everything more complex than a 3 input gate had to be made up from that basic element. Lots and lots of printed circuitry and wiring of the modules together.
It also had no Halt instruction. The last thing you wanted was to have the program get off somewhere executing data and run into something that looked like a Halt instruction. Many of the addresses were actually external hardware. One was the night watchman. This location had to be read every so often, but not too often, to verify the program was still running. If it wasn’t the external hardware would send a Gojam signal (now it would be called an interrupt) to restart the thing.
Thanks for the excellent detail! 🙂