Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
This is a fascinating write-up of a fascinating subject. I just would like to express my appreciation for all the effort that must have gone into this.
One of the things that I like most about the Apollo era, is that many of the solutions employed actually required true understanding and innovation. Methods needed to be designed, implementations were not available off the shelf, and the constraints in reliability, materials, power consumption, computing speed, weight, size, data storage, transmission bit rates, etc. must have been massive.
These days, computing power is abundant, stuff is cheap and off the shelf; so there is much less of an incentive to make things tight, clean and efficient.
It is of course great that you can plow through gigabytes of data with a sloppy python script, but if you need to build something that achieves the same with TTL logic, if that, you think about the problem in a totally different way.
Apr 25, 2022, 8:46:46 PM
Posted to The digital ranging system that measured the distance to the Apollo spacecraft