Examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle’s I/O Processor
Article excerpt
Ken Shirriff digs into vintage NASA hardware, this time examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle’s I/O Processor. The Space Shuttle’s five general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: the […]
Ken Shirriff digs into vintage NASA hardware, this time examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle’s I/O Processor.
The Space Shuttle’s five general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: the box on the right is the CPU, a 32-bit processor that executed 420,000 instructions per second. These computers were designed before microprocessors became popular, so the processor was built from multiple boards crammed with simple chips and they used magnetic core memory rather than DRAM chips.
I obtained two circuit cards from the I/O Processor, each a 9″×3″ rectangle packed with tiny chips and other components. In IBM lingo, each card is called a “page.”
See the extremely detailed analysis Ken has on the page here.