Background The Apollo Guidance computer served to perform the guidance and control of the Apollo missions. The AGC was designed and built in the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, and later the Draper Laboratory in the 1960s. The AGC is perhaps the first well known use of integrated components (IC’s). These ICs were so expensive when the first AGC was being built that the first version was dismantled and the parts used in the subsequent versions of the AGC. Thus, the original AGC is no longer in existence. Collaborators Marc Sweetgall, Olin '10 Sarah Zimmermann, Olin '10 Mary Germino, Olin '10 Goals Our goal in recreating the AGC in Verilog was to learn how this early computer worked. It is our hope that the following information on the modules of the AGC, their purpose and structure along with our methods of testing, will help subsequent inquirers better understand the function of the AGC. Acknowledgments The schematics of the AGC are freely available online, as are many simulations. One resource heavily used by the team was the klabs website at http://klabs.org/ . In addition to countless resources on the history of the AGC, links to the original schematics, and papers written by computer scientists on the AGC, the klabs website contains a series of manuals on how to build the AGC in your basement. This series of 9 manuals was written by John Pultorak who spent 4 years replicating the AGC. Contents Project report is available in PDF form below. All source code, test harnesses, etc. are also available as a ZIP file. |
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