Customer Reviews

Journey to the Moon (Library of Flight Series)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A super volume - full of detail, a super account of the development of the guidance computer used by the Apollo flights. At the same time, this excellent book is a fascinating account of the growth of the computer itself; we forget how much technology Apollo kick-started, and this book illustrates very effectively the genesis of a new, extraordinary industry

Eldon thank you for putting to paper this bit of history. The photos are great. I really gained a sense of the time, the challenges, and the accomplishments.

I try to imagine after reading your book, how proud you must be to have helped make history. The Apollo program is the greatest accomplishment of the 20th Century.

Eldon Hall has done something rare with this book. He has taken a very complex subject, nearly forgotten due to time, and made it utterly relevant and engaging. For anyone with an interest in either space or computer history, this is a vital book.

It is somewhat technical (I had no idea how they made rope memory modules, an early ROM format before this book for instance), but Hall is very careful to explain things in terms that an average reader can readily understand.

The book itself documents the Apollo Guidance Computer from conception through numerous iterations and changes, to final successful lunar landings. Although the AGC capabilities seem trivial today, the AGC was the world's first Integrated Chip computer, and had enormous hurdles to overcome. In the end, of course, we know that Hall and his fellow employees at MIT did a good job...what I didn't know before was exactly what they had to do and the challenges they had to overcome.

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was a pathfinder in the truest sense of the word. Built in a time when computers where as large as rooms, the AGC was an immense undertaking that culminated in a beautiful, elegant, compact machine that guided our astronauts to the lunar surface and back without failure. The Apollo Guidance computer was, alas, already obsolete by the time it flew to the moon. "Moore's Law" (where computing power doubles every year or at least every 18 months) had once again proven itself axiomatic. Being digital even in an analog age wasn't easy, but the folks at the MIT Instrumentation Lab pulled it off with great success.

Eldon C. Hall weaves for the reader a journey that reveals the gestation of the computer from it's inception through the actual lunar missions. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the computers that they sit in front of on a daily basis. The AGC helped weave today's digital DNA.

The Apollo Guidance Computer-Just think of it as having a little bit of the Moon in your PC.

Eldon Hall, one of the designers of the Apollo guidance computer, has put together the definitive history of this extrordinary machine. He builds the story from early research projects at the MIT instrumentation lab, and takes the reader through the development process, and up to the the final design. As Journey to the Moon is a highly technical story, the general reader may get lost in some of the more technical details. Fear not! Much of the technical details can be safely ignored without loosing the story line. A superb collection of color pictures are included, and are alone worth the price of the book. Drawbacks? Most glaringly, this is a story about the hardware. Very little insight is given on the software development effort. Major software developers, like Alan Klumpp and Donald Eyles are not even mentioned. Also, dispite the fact the computer interacted mostly with the guidance platform, we learn very little about it. Dispites these grumblings, the book is an excellent reference, and should be on every space historians bookshelf.

The book presents a close-up look at the challenges of devising new and novel technological solutions from the unique perspective of a person who was there when it was happening. The stories of some of the people behind the innovations provide a rare glimpse into the thinking and personalities of the engineers involved with the development of the AGC, and the descriptions of the interactions between NASA and the engineers at MIT offer some unique insights into the dynamics of how space missions really happen.

Computer technology has changed dramatically since the days of Apollo, and that change is due in large part to the Apollo program. Comparing the photographs of the prototype systems for the AGC to the package that actually flew on the spacecraft gives new meaning to word "amazing". The software that ran on the AGC was also a stunning feat in and of itself. The AGC utilized real-time multi-tasking before it was even a commonly accepted approach in the software industry (and it's now a standard feature of every cell phone and MP3 player).

The text is well-written and easily accessible, with enough details to keep the more technical minded reader interested. As someone who stood on a hill behind his house in Florida as a kid and watched the Saturn V rockets disappear over the horizon, stayed up late to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, and then later ended up working in the aerospace industry, this book has a special meaning for me. I highly recommend it.

A great read. I couldn't put it down. Technical enough to engage the scientifically savvy. Humorous and personal too. A must for those interested in how we became surrounded by computers in our daily lives.

Even though the marketplace is getting bigger, many publications today are either "academic level" or "dummed down" for general consumption. This book is positioned between these two extremes and is just what I was looking for. One of many surprising things I learned was how the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) was the largest consumer if integrated circuits in the 1960s and was mainly responsible for kicking off this industry.

This text is a very narrow treatise on an archaic topic; specifically, the history of the Apollo Navigation Computer. This computer was compact and versatile, being the first major effort to use integrated circuits extensively but before microprocessors.
The book is well written and interesting to me. There are many color photographs and diagrams that bring the author's description's to life. His narrative is enlightening for technically knowledgeable readers though the author also takes time to explain some basic concepts without slowing the work down.
The only problem with the book is that it costs 58 bucks. This is very expensive for a paperback book and that amounts to almost $3 dollars per page. This is probably due to being printed in small numbers by a specialty press. For this much money, though, I expect a hardcover.
Due to the specialization of its content and its high cost, I recommend this book only to those with great interest in either in early manned spaceflight or the history of computers.

Rising from the very heart of manned Lunar exploration, this book put the Apollo guidance computer in a very privileged site above other contemporary computers. So compact, and reliable, it had leaded the Apollo lunar modules and moonwalkers and their exploration tools to the moon's dust and back to orbit.