How did humans reach moon?

What was the technology used during the late 60's?

Published in

Shyam Cortex

3 min readNov 11, 2019

Ever wondered how humans drove that 360 odd feet rocket to the moon? Its just unbelievable to know how they actually succeeded with the technology they had back in 1969.

The Saturn V (pronounced as Saturn Five) had different sections.

One of the most important sections of the Saturn V was the Instrument Unit.
The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) was a computer that resided in the Instrument Unit (IU)

LVDC (Launch Vehicle Digital Computer)

This thing that put humans on the moon. You’ll be surprised how it was actually programmed and how much work was put into making this thing so redundant and accurate and putting a man on the moon.

**The white colored chips you see are some of the first miniaturized transistors made in 1969.**

The technology was considered to a quantum leap in computing back in the time.

LVDC is a black box that responded to inputs from sensors in the Saturn V and to ground telemetry, but there was no panel into which astronauts could enter commands or get feedback from it.

So LVDC mainly depended on logic cards and the memory module.

**Logic card for the computer. Stacks of these were used to perform calculations.**

These logic boards communicate with the input from the sensor and compares the value which is predetermined and sends the output to the Apollo Guidance Computer.

So where did the memory come from?

How did the store crucial data back in those days?

Things get a lot interesting here.

**This is the memory module of the LVDC.** **Those beads are Physical Bits.**

Amazing right?

Magic of this is they were done by hand.

There are 8192 beads/rings in one plane, and there are 14 of those planes to make this complete memory module. Total memory of one module adds upto 112KB (For comparison if you take a photo with a VGA camera it would be more than 112KB)

This is how a physical bit works!!