Frank O'Brien (1)

I thought this book was very disappointing. It is more of an extremely detailed and randomly organized technical manual of Apollo than a look into the actual AGC architecture.

The book starts by going into extreme detail into some parts of the AGC instruction set. What is left out is a lot of the general information. There is nothing about the hardware part of the architecture; not even a block diagram. Without a block diagram or any high-level schematics, I cannot understand the basic design of the computer. Understanding the nitty-gritty instructions of a computer I don't understand is irrelevant data without an overview of the computer itself.

Then the book discusses the Executive and Interpreter functions of the AGC, assuming that all readers have an understanding of how they work. I found myself wondering how the AGC was capable of running customizable programs with such minimal erasable/programmable memory. The author never clearly distinguishes what is saved on the fixed memory (literal ROM), and what is saved in erasable/programmable memory. If I can enter functions into the DSKY, then that implies a type of memory I can rewrite. I know the author is a computer scientist, and not a computer or electrical engineer, but not including any information about computer hardware made this book really hard to follow.

The rest of the book delved into technical specifications of Apollo missions, and was maybe only peripherally related to the AGC. I was completely uninterested in that information. I mean, I bought a book called The Apollo Guidance Computer Architecture and Operation, I wanted to read about the computer's architecture, not what thrusters fire at what moment in time in any given Apollo mission.

Finally, this book is very disorganized and has an enormous number of typos. The author does not appear to be good at presenting information in a logical manner. This made the book hard to follow at best. I found it to be a disappointing book, and as one of the very few books I actually purchased, a poor choice for me not to have borrowed from a library instead.… (lisätietoja)