[HN Gopher] Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spacefl...
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Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation
computer
Author : Stratoscope
Score : 157 points
Date : 2023-03-26 05:25 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.righto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.righto.com)
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| Very impressive. I wondered how this could possibly work, but it
| actually only does fixed circular orbits by dead reckoning
| akash5459 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Friend, I understand your desire to promote your website. But
| the article you linked has not even the slightest relationship
| to this one.
|
| That's not what we do here. You can expect that your comment
| will be marked [flagged] [dead] in the next few minutes.
|
| If you ever want to contribute any on-topic comments, I am sure
| they will be welcomed.
| stargrazer wrote:
| One of the museums has one of the early aircraft based mechanical
| inertial guidance systems on display. Seems it was two or three
| or four times larger than this. It would be interesting to find a
| similarly detailed analysis of how those things operated.
| blululu wrote:
| That is very cool. I remember seeing a post on this and there was
| a line of thinking to the tune of "modern engineers are no where
| near as impressive as the ones 50 years ago". Someone woking in
| astronautical engineering asking a basic question about how this
| would handle things like eccentricity, procession of nodes, etc,
| and the response was simple: "it doesn't!". Honestly these things
| are really cool I would totally go for a trackball globe being
| spun around by some Arduino controlled rollers. Even without the
| gears a modern recreation would be a really cool thing.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I am reminded of the Antikythera mechanism here. It's fascinating
| to think that computing technology has been around so long, its
| just that transistors allowed for its rapid advancement and
| higher level logic programming. But we could still do a lot
| without silicone parts.
| fathyb wrote:
| This is coolest thing I've read all year. It's fascinating to see
| all the work that went through a single instrument.
| Nosignificance8 wrote:
| So many fascinating facts about this! Did you know this had
| used gyroscopes to calculate the position and orientation of
| the spacecraft in orbit. It was designed to operate in the
| harsh environment of space, where temperatures could range from
| -100 to +150 degrees Celsius. And the thing only weighed 10kg!
| And super duper reliable I believe it had a mean time between
| failures of about 10,000 hours. Old yet still so impressive!
| Thanks for this!
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _The Globus INK is a remarkable piece of machinery, an analog
| computer that calculates orbits through an intricate system of
| gears, cams, and differentials. It provided astronauts with a
| high-resolution, full-color display of the spacecraft 's
| position, way beyond what an electronic space computer could
| provide in the 1960s._
|
| If nothing else, at least skim through this article to see the
| photos. It really was quite a remarkable and beautiful piece of
| machinery!
| z3c0 wrote:
| Analog computers have such an elegance to them. I've wondered
| if we'll ever seen them return for specialized purposes,
| outside of music.
| bitL wrote:
| There are attempts to solve hard optimization problems in an
| instant with them.
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| You've probably already seen it, but there's a classic US
| Navy training film which talks about how they were used to
| solve differential equations in battleships around the WWII
| era.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug
| kens wrote:
| Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
| Drblessing wrote:
| For someone who grew up with the internet the fact this is
| mechanical blows my mind.
| lm28469 wrote:
| If you ever go to Berlin check the Techniknuseum, they have a
| bunch of replicas of mechanical computers, like this one :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
| chiph wrote:
| Check out the video below from Marc where he works on his Model
| 19 Teletype. Teletypes used a serial to parallel converter
| comprised of a solenoid and a multi-lobe camshaft that
| converted an incoming electrical signal (serial) into 5
| individual bits (mechanical). Timing was important, so the
| motor on the Teletype had to be running at a known speed. You
| used a tuning fork that had a slot cut in it to look through to
| check it periodically.
|
| Marc mentions how Teletypes would commonly run with one or 1.5
| stop bits. You need this to tell the mechanical parts to "lock
| up" at the end of a character. Preferred would be to run with
| 1.5 stop bits so that the machines became self-synchronizing --
| if the wire got reconnected in the middle of a character they
| would start producing readable output again after only a few
| garbled characters.
|
| The way the camshaft worked was each bit had a window of time
| where it could be set or cleared (marking vs spacing) by the
| solenoid. For letter H the bits are 10100 [0]. So the first
| lobe of the camshaft would come around and the solenoid would
| be in it's marking position (1) so the 1st bail would be
| selected. The second lobe would come around a few milliseconds
| later and the solenoid would be in it's spacing position (0)
| and the 2nd bail would NOT be selected. A few milliseconds
| later the third lobe would come around and the solenoid would
| be in it's marking position (1) so the 3rd bail would be
| selected. This would continue for the next two bits (spacing)
| and then the stop bit would arrive and the machine would use
| the values stored in the bails to print the letter H and/or
| punch an H (10100) into the paper tape.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug5lUI-hs3s
|
| Ever wonder why carriage return and line feed are different
| codes in Baudot, ASCII, and Unicode? It's because Teletypes
| needed the time to physically move the printing carriage back
| to column 1. Operators were trained to hit CR CR LF in case the
| Teletype at the other end was a little slow in returning from
| column 80 so the next line would start in column 1.
|
| [0] Assuming you were in Letters. Because you only had 5 bits,
| alphabetic (Letters) and numbers/symbols (Figures) were
| alternately selected by 11111 and 11011. So 10100 could produce
| either an H or a # depending on whether you were in Letters or
| Figures mode.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| On the Model 33 ASR that I learned programming with, we were
| taught to type CR LF RUBOUT at the end of each line when
| punching a tape. RUBOUT is like a no-op character which is
| ignored by the receiving end, so it gave a little extra time
| for both the carriage return and line feed to complete.
|
| RUBOUT is also how you would correct a typo on the tape: you
| would backspace the tape punch, hit RUBOUT, and then the
| character you meant. The RUBOUT character had all holes
| punched, effectively erasing the typo.
|
| When operating the remote computer interactively, we just had
| to type CR, as the remote system would provide the LF and a
| slight pause. Working directly on the remote timesharing was
| strongly discouraged, as dial-up time cost $30/hour back
| then, or about $250/hour in today's dollars.
|
| So we would punch our code on a tape, dial in just long
| enough to run the tape and get our printout, and hang up
| right away.
| xattt wrote:
| I am more impressed by the reliability of the thing over time
| if the position is manually initialized.
| frostyj wrote:
| sometimes you do wonder how USSR, with all these mad scientists
| and engineers, could ever go down
| sureglymop wrote:
| To be fair they were facing pretty much the entire rest of the
| worlds fight against "evil communism". It's more remarkable how
| far they got with essentially a new way of trying things.
| aivisol wrote:
| You can remove quotes in your sentence.
| smdyc1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| What a nonsense.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| It's not nonsense that during the cold war the US & allies
| put sanctions and trade embargos in place for the USSR &
| Warsaw pact countries, similar how we have with Russia
| today, meaning their goods had a limited export market,
| plus they had restrictions on high tech imports as well
| leading to the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal. Also, with the
| USD being the global reserve currency, the USSR & Co. were
| dependent on the USD for trade.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's nonsense because it wasn't 'the rest of the world'
| and it is nonsense because plenty of the fight came from
| within the USSR. Ignoring that makes it an utterly
| meaningless statement. And that's before we get into
| parties resisting the USSR because it started wars with
| them.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| realusername wrote:
| When you can't provide basic needs to your population, it
| doesn't matter how good the scientists are
| jabron wrote:
| [dead]
| medo-bear wrote:
| soviet union was actually very good at providing basic needs
| (food, housing, education, medical care) to its population.
| in fact much better than even the US does right now. that is
| not the reason ussr collapsed
| aivisol wrote:
| Source? As the person who spent good part of my life there,
| I would like to know more details. I do remember my parents
| waiting for an government provided apartment for 15 years
| though.
| medo-bear wrote:
| its pretty well documented but here is a quora answer
| https://www.quora.com/How-expensive-were-housing-costs-
| in-th...
| medo-bear wrote:
| another source
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home
| _ow...
|
| all ex socialist countries
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The poorly stocked Soviet grocery stores would suggest
| otherwise.
| medo-bear wrote:
| do you think that means that people in postwar ussr were
| malnurished ?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I think they were left living in an unnecessarily bleak
| existence because of the failures of centralized resource
| allocation.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Ukrainians that died in holodomor caused by Stalin disagree
| medo-bear wrote:
| i probably should have made it clear that i was talking
| about post ww2 ussr. you know, the one that took away
| crimea from russia and gave it to ukraine. also the same
| ussr that gave national autonomy rights to almost every
| ethnic group within its borders (something unheard of in
| the west); actually this is the "atomic bomb" that putin
| said lenin placed under russia :)
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Sick that you as a russian troll claims russia gave
| ukrainians indepence. They are fighting for their lives
| to be free of the evil russians raping and killing them.
| Do you deny that?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Aha checked your comments and you are clearly a russian.
| Half your comments are about defending russia. The other
| half is about "NATO is bad".
| medo-bear wrote:
| lol i actually have no connection to russia. but whatever
| helps you deal. i rather enjoy broadening peoples
| perspectives. dont worry though, if you were a putin
| fanboy i would have quite a bit to say too
|
| and yes ... nato is bad. every imperialist organisation
| is bad. be it russian, american, chinese, or whatever
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Sure you are totally not a russian troll. :) let me guess
| you also deny that russia is engaged in a genocide?
| philistine wrote:
| Stagnation killed them. Those mad scientists, and Soviet
| society in general, never stopped being able to make those
| things. It's the fact they weren't able to be more efficient,
| to increase their output, to give better and more food to its
| population that was the poison pill.
|
| The US took advantage by forcing them to increase military
| spending. Gorbachev tried to find a way out of stagnation and
| killed the whole thing instead.
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(page generated 2023-03-26 23:02 UTC)