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Old 21st Nov 2018, 12:07 pm   #5
Craig Sawyers
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Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Oxford, UK.
Posts: 4,941
Default Re: Apollo Guidance Computer

There is a superb Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction book called The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracey Kidder. Describes Data General's supercharged skunk works in their 1980 attempt to catch up with Digital's stranglehold on the mini-computer market with their launch of the VAX.

It even has some industrial espionage in it, when the project manager poses as a cleaner, and gets himself into the room with a VAX in it, and spends the night taking it to bits to learn its architecture.

Recruited new graduates as the project team "Because they don't understand that the project is impossible, so they will succeed where experienced designers will fail"

Still worth reading, although the technology is of course massively dated.
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