Ken Shirriff's blog

Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever

Risky line printer music on a vintage IBM mainframe

At the Computer History Museum , we recently obtained card decks for a 50-year-old computer music program. Back then, most computers didn...

Reliable after 50 years: The Apollo Guidance Computer's switching power supplies

We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...

Looking inside a 1970s PROM chip that stores data in microscopic fuses

The MMI 5300 was a memory chip from the early 1970s, storing 1024 bits in tiny fuses. 1 Unlike regular RAM chips, this was a PROM ( Progra...

Apollo Guidance Computer: Dipstiks and reverse engineering the core rope simulator

Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. The AGC'...

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