| ▲ | detourdog 4 hours ago | |
I have been collecting Autonetics artifacts off ebay for decades. What I find interesting about this time period is that Autonetics made 3 different efforts for digital inertial guidance. The first version used vacuum tubes and was never commpleted. The second version used the new discrete components developed by Sprague Electric. This version went into production. Autonetics then set about exploring the lithographic process to shrink the discrete component version into an IC based system. Autonetics essentially built the same computer using 3 different circuit construction methods. Here are some pictures of pieces of all 3 systems. The IC's are from about 1967. One of the 2 nerds in the photo is Richard Stallman next to the Autonetics D-17B. An early inertial guidance system distributed to universities to study as real time computers after decommissioning. There are also the hard disks(which the D-17B used as a clock) and gyroscopes that served as inputs. | ||