The Age of Technology

During the late1950s the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a race for space, and the U.S. was clearly getting its butt kicked. On May 25, 1961, because he believed that achievements in space played a crucial role in the competitive connection between Communism and Democracy, President John F. Kennedy went before Congress, and called upon the United States to commit “To achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to the Earth." Considering that the U.S. was still another year away from even putting a human being into orbit, this was indeed, a formidable challenge.

Early in the planning stages of the lunar venture, NASA scientists ascertained that a successful moon mission would require an onboard computer that had capabilities superseding those of most of the computers in existence, and that there was a problem; computers at that time, filled entire rooms. Undaunted, armed with 46 million mid 1960’s-era dollars, and using a central processing unit, and integrated circuits created by Robert Noyce, a physicist and inventor at

Fairchild Semiconductor, the 

MIT Instrumentation Laboratory designed, and Raytheon Company fabricated,

 the Apollo Guidance Computer, and accompanying software. Although only approximately the size of a shoe box, the AGC in many ways, could out perform any other computer of the 1960’s; it was the first computer to incorporate integrated circuits; it could multi-task, it had random access memory, and it is considered to be the first modern information processing system. And so began life in the Noyes Law Era, and the Age of Technology*...

*blogger is apparently still using that computer for its formatting