The following article was written by Tom Robinson, collectSPACE.com contributor.
When NASA’s Apollo spacecraft launched to the moon, it had on board two briefcase-size computers that for their day would normally have required enough floor space to fill a couple of rooms. The compact devices were small, but had enough processing power and memory to guide the astronauts from Earth to the moon.
Fifty-five years later, the British startup Apollo Instruments has been able to shrink the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) even further — to the size of a wristwatch. Now, anyone can wear the display and keyboard system, or DSKY (pronounced “disk-key”), that astronauts used on the command and lunar modules.
The DSKY Moonwatch is more than just a novelty timepiece; wearers can interact with it just like the Apollo crews did and fly to the moon (rocket and spacecraft not included).
“I started thinking, could you recreate the DSKY at the scale of an Apple Watch?” said Mark Clayton, Apollo Instruments‘ CEO. An engineer with a lifelong passion for aviation and space, Clayton was working on miniaturized digital displays when he noticed that the vibrant green glow they emitted bore a striking resemblance to the iconic DSKY display.
Using original drawings from MIT, Clayton and his team, which includes two former Formula 1 engineers, set about scaling down the DSKY.
“We were pushing our manufacturing equipment to its limits, producing something so intricate and small,” he said.
Related: The Apollo Program: How NASA sent astronauts to the moon
Nouns and verbs
Equally revolutionary as the AGC’s small size was the way the Apollo astronauts interacted with it. Rather than carrying thousands of punch cards into space or relying on a sprawling bank of switches and lights, as was typical for computers of the time, MIT designed one of the first display and keyboard systems, which was then used to enter numbers representing verb and noun codes.
To those accustomed to modern point-and-click setups, the AGC’s approach can appear challenging to grasp. In essence, verbs represented actions the computer could perform, while nouns were specific data inputs.
For example, pressing “verb” followed by “35” triggered a test of the indicator lights and display. Verb and noun commands also instructed the Apollo lunar module’s computer to begin the landing routine….
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