,
4 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Soviet flight computer S-530 built by NPO AP (Automatics and Instrument Building). 100 KHz clock, 45,000 operations per second. This was used in the 1970s and 1980s to control Mars and Venus probes. Here is one of two redundant arithmetic-logic units. 
8K of 20-bit micro-program instruction ROM was implemented as core-rope memory. Wires threaded thru or around sensors represented rows of 1's and 0's. The large power transistors driving it were the cause of failure in Mars-4,5,6, and 7 in 1973.
13-bit data memory had 256 words of ferrite core RAM and 2K words of core-rope ROM.
The S-530 could, if necessary, carry out the entire Mars mission autonomously, reading information from gyro sensors and an optical unit that measured the angular size of Mars.
(@kenshirriff thought you might like this. Watching the videos about your work on AGC.)
(@kenshirriff thought you might like this. Watching the videos about your work on AGC.)
