Apollo Guidance Computer Project - MIT Conference Series, Part 3

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BROWN: The reason we've got people here today is that this is part of a series of, I guess, group oral histories, where we're trying to get people together who were involved in the Apollo guidance project and just get you to tell us a few of your stories. Just tell us a little bit about your experiences, what you really like about working on this particular project.

This is part of a larger, a much, much larger project, which breaks down into five units of which we are one. We're studying the Apollo guidance computer. There are also projects that are studying the history of materials science on the rise of bioinformatics, on the dispute of the physics about the process of renormalization, and there is one other one--

MINDELL: Material science, renormalization.

BROWN: Bioinformatics.

MINDELL: Bioinformatics, molecular evolution.

BROWN: Molecular evolution.

MINDELL: Pretty broad coverage in the history of science, but we're really the only engineering one.

BROWN: And this is part of a project that has a couple of items. The first one is really to figure out how to do research into very large projects in recent history of science and technology. Historians tend to find that the further back they go, the easier it is to manage your sources. There are a lot less things to deal with.

Once you start to deal with projects in science and engineering post the Second World War, it starts to become a problem of how to manage the huge amount of information that you have access to and huge amount of information that might bear on your particular project.

So one of the things that we're doing as part of this exercise is really an investigation. How do we tell the history of such a large scale project, as something like the Apollo guidance computer? And another thrust of the project is really to figure out what use the world wide web is going to be in helping us with these kinds of things.

And as you can see, and I know that some of you have seen this, we have put together a website, which is an ongoing project, which is gathering together the information that we gather, and the results of these kinds of conferences, to make this available both to us through our research, and to other people in the historical community to do their research, and to people in the wider community.

You'd be surprised how much interest there is in the wider community. Since we put this web site up, we would get emails, some random emails, from members of the public on a regular basis, either asking us about the website, telling us about information that's out there, asking questions about the information that's on there. There was a guy who was attempting to rebuild one of these machines, and he's had some communication with us. There's a lot of interest there.

HALL: Lots of luck.

BATES: Was he the guy in Venezuela?

BROWN: No, this is a different one.

SPEAKER: This is a different guy. There's one trying to program the simulator--

BROWN: Yeah.

SPEAKER: --on the PC too. Did he contact here yet?

BROWN: He sent me a very brief email saying, this is what I'm trying to do. But he hasn't send any results yet. We shall see.

HANLEY: [INAUDIBLE]

BROWN: Yeah. There's a guy who actually, apparently, judging from the email that he sent me, actually wants to rebuild with the hardware. He wants to go from scratch.

HANLEY: You can never do that.

SPEAKER: Don't tell him.

SPEAKER: We don't even know how we did it.

HANLEY: A good example is when Eldon was the Trident program, and he had to get diodes. And he went to Fairchild and he wanted diodes with given specs for the Trident program. And they couldn't do it. They said they couldn't do it. And then he pulled out of his pocket a whole bunch of Fairchild diodes from the Apollo program that met all of the specifications. These people just don't know how to do it anymore. I'll keep quiet.

SPEAKER: We're recording some of this.

SPEAKER: We are.

BROWN: I thought I'd jsut very briefly run through the website and explain one or two things that we are doing here. We've already run a couple of conferences, and I know there are people here today who should have been at the first conference. It's surprisingly difficult sometimes to track them down.

So as we hold these conferences, we put these up on the web. So there are lots of familiar faces there. Then we make the transcriptions of those conferences available. We also are gathering documents and scanning these and putting these on the web.

This is, I guess, perhaps a sort of complement to the oral histories, the accounts, where you can actually get your hands on--

SPEAKER: What kind of documents?

HALL: There's a whole bunch of them on the web.

BROWN: I can give you an example.

HALL: I assume NASA still has a library of [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER: No, they founded that. They did have a library.

MINDELL: NASA is-- yeah, actually. I was down at NASA last week, and actually, they're very happy and very supportive of this project.

SPEAKER: Down in Houston?

MINDELL: No, not in Houston. In Washington at the [? first ?] place. All the good stuff's in Houston and all of the bureaucratic stuff's in Washington. It turns out we have to get NASA to let Draper have us, to tell Draper they let us have access to a lot of paper archives as well. Even though NASA doesn't think so. But that's another story.

POUNDSTONE: Does Draper still got all the drawings archived?

HALL: We're trying to find the drawings at home. I don't know. It seems like they should be there someplace. Nobody there knows, even they run the Apollo program. So they don't know where the drawings are.

BATES: Well, it's the same problem in Raytheon. I tried to go in and find archives in Raytheon and they're worried about tomorrow, not yesterday.

POUNDSTONE: But I do know the aperture cards were saved.

HALL: Well, they were, but where are those aperture cards?

POUNDSTONE: They were shipped to NASA.

HALL: You think so?

POUNDSTONE: Yes. It was a contract requirement.

HALL: Well, I would think so. Then NASA must have them someplace. But I had a copy that I sent to the American Computer Museum up in Bozeman, Montana. And I can get those back, if necessary. It's better to send those aperture cards.

POUNDSTONE: For some strange reason, back when I was working, I got picked to go to a conference in Washington that held by the Smithsonian, a similar organization. I forget what it was, but it had to do with archiving and maintaining the history of all kinds of various special projects. And they had representatives from Boeing and Grumman and Lockheed, and everybody in the country was there.

And I learned about some of the details of how they do it and all the problems of storing documents, and all that. But the one you spoke of is a common problem in the whole aerospace industry. Although there are historians and archives who would just love to get a hold of this stuff, the companies could care less.

There's a few companies that do it. Boeing had done some on theirs. But most companies, they're, you know. And when I went back to my company and tried to report that there was a lot of interest in the air, I got the same old, who cares?

MINDELL: Most history of technology ends up getting written about government and universities.

POUNDSTONE: Well, you can't make any money doing it is the problem, and we're money making people.

MINDELL: The companies are classically--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

POUNDSTONE: Is that Cline?

SPEAKER: That's Cline.

POUNDSTONE: Jack Poundstone.

FRASIER: Hi, Jack. Long time, no see.

POUNDSTONE: Good to see you.

BATES: Dave Bates. How are you?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]

SPEAKER: He's not here yet.

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] is coming, I know.

SPEAKER: Oh, he is?

SPEAKER: Yeah, because I generally [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER: Bart said he was coming?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: OK, good.

BATES: I ran into the same thing as he just said. I mean, they're worried about tomorrow. They're not worrying about yesterday, OK. And I couldn't find any pictures, or anything else like that.

POUNDSTONE: Well, I know in our company, Raytheon, is now-- there is a retiree who's working up in Lexington who is actively trying to develop a-- I guess it's more of a museum.

BATES: A museum, yeah.

POUNDSTONE: Of hardware and pictures and things. He's been on the phone with me several times, wanting me to produce stuff like this, which I never got around to until I got ready to come to this meeting. But I don't know if he ever got a hold of you or not. I gave him your name.

BATES: He's only open on Thursdays.

POUNDSTONE: Yeah. Well, it's a retiree who's not being paid. All the company ever did is giving him a little space in the building they didn't know what else to do.

SPEAKER: Who is that?

POUNDSTONE: I forget his name. Smith?

BATES: Yeah, Smith, I think.

POUNDSTONE: Some guy from [INAUDIBLE].

BATES: [INAUDIBLE] in Lexington.

POUNDSTONE: But anyway, I think that's typical of what-- the only reason it's happening is because the retiree is interested. The company could care less.

MINDELL: More often, companies actively-- I mean, they worry a lot about liabilities. And they destroy as they can.

POUNDSTONE: Well then, of course, the government policy say you're supposed to do that anyway. You almost have to cheat to keep an old piece of hardware. Of course, that never bothered Draper. I notice you guys used to do it all the time.

FRASIER: Actually, the guys at Delco managed to find all the pieces, I think, for a complete system for one of the reunions they had about three years ago. So at their reunion in Milwaukee they had laid out on the table all the major pieces-- I think they had a computer, too.

POUNDSTONE: I remember one time, somebody went to one of these junkyards and found a PIPA. And they picked it up for $1 or two and gave it to the gentleman and me.

BATES: It was right over here in the back area. He used to buy it by the pound.

SPEAKER: Do you remember what the name of that was.

BLAIR-SMITH: If you talk about old-time packaging, do you remember Dimitri Grabee?

SPEAKER: Who?

BLAIR-SMITH: Dimitri Grabee.

SPEAKER: Grabee, yeah.

BLAIR-SMITH: He was the one that holds the patent on the multi-layer board technology.

SPEAKER: Yeah, we made the [INAUDIBLE] out of their boards.

POUNDSTONE: Who did he work for?

BLAIR-SMITH: What?

POUNDSTONE: Who did he work for?

BLAIR-SMITH: Photocircuits, I think, at the time. Anyway, the only reason why I mention that is he has a fantastic museum, of all types of [? patented ?] stuff. Anything that he ever met with.

HALL: And one of these, he walked out of the lab with the logic tray at block one. Now, how he got out of the lab, I don't know.

[LAUGHTER]

[INAUDIBLE]

POUNDSTONE: Like I said, Draper was never too particular about the rules.

HALL: I would have gladly walked out with it if I could have.

BROWN: So as I--

HALL: He did. OK.

BROWN: Oh, I'm sorry. So as I said, we're collecting documents. We're collecting photos. So I guess I'll put out a plea at this point. If you guys have documents or photos or anything in your basement or any memorabilia that you might have, we would love to see this. We'd like to scan it, put it on the web, make it available for posterity.

POUNDSTONE: Did you ever get a computer?

BROWN: No, we did not manage to get a computer yet.

POUNDSTONE: [INAUDIBLE] the Smithsonian has a bunch of them.

SPEAKER: We shipped five down out of the Smithsonian, as I remember. They've got one on display. They used to have it working. And we had a contract to service it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: I think they actually have a computer on display, don't they?

BATES: That's right.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: If you went down and asked, you might get one.

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] a long time ago. They had a block two, you know, the gold anodized one. [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER: It's not there anymore, I don't think.

SPEAKER: Oh, really?

BATES: Did you ask him about looking into their warehouse? Because that's where they shipped them all.

SPEAKER: Well, they also sent one of them back up here. MIT Museum has one.

SPEAKER: Well, is complete now?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: Just the memory tray?

SPEAKER: Just memory tray.

HALL: Well, did you check that?

INTERVIEWER: What?

HALL: The [INAUDIBLE] Bell, out there in Moffett Field, that museum.

BROWN: No, [INAUDIBLE].

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

HALL: That's amazing. Where's that one then?

SPEAKER: Well, I had one once. I don't where it-- but [INAUDIBLE] probably [INAUDIBLE].

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

BATES: We had a display case. Jack wanted the display case with all the stuff that we had. We have brought people in. You could show him what we had. And he had all the stuff from the standpoint of the integrated circuits and the diodes and everything else, both raw and plastic that we got from the lines that we had there. But we also had an Apollo computer. And what happened with that Zagrodnik should know because he was the last program manager, I think.

POUNDSTONE: No, it was right in front of my office.

BATES: Yeah.

POUNDSTONE: Perhaps it's still there. I don't know.

BATES: No. I've been in there lately, yeah. It's not there. Let me run it down. Just give me the assigment, and I'll go ahead and do it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: Let's just finish up with our [INAUDIBLE].

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

POUNDSTONE: Excuse us, Alex. We talk a lot.

BROWN: So as I said, we're collecting documents. There are other features of the website, which include comment forums, in particular. So once we've had this conference, we would like to invite you guys to go to the website, log on, and just pass comment, if you have any comments to make, about the transcripts. And this is part of the exercise is to encourage this online interaction so we can get a little bit of debate and a little bit if [INAUDIBLE].

HALL: On that point, it's not clear to me, even, how do you make comments? Even though I've been supposedly on the inside.

BROWN: Yeah, this is kind of embarrassing. This is not an aspect of the project that we have a great deal of control over. I'm assured by the people who manage the larger website that they are putting time and effort into making this more user friendly.

HALL: Because I can put in quite a few comments.

POUNDSTONE: I assume at the moment, you could email him.

BROWN: You could certainly email me. As you can see, the transcripts are already up. And so if you would like to read those and email me comments, I would be more than happy to [INAUDIBLE].

POUNDSTONE: Well, I notice there's quite a few question marks in places where you couldn't understand what they said. Somebody can fill those in.

MINDELL: The website requires that you log in. So if we have all your email addresses, you just log in with your email address, make up a password. And then when you log in, it allows you to comment in their discussion forums. And a lot of the idea is that of the projects that are on the site, the other scientists people are studying, we're fortunate that we have the only one that's really inherently localized to Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so we figured we'll start by getting everybody, as many people as we can, who are around here, in a room talking and then hopefully make a clean segue to either you guys or other people who are not able to come to Cambridge, who can then participate in the conversations as well.

So in a way, everything we do here today and what we've already been doing is intended as a starter for a national or global comment network. And this is part of the research part of this program. So we don't know how well it's going to work yet. And we have the fortunate, also, of having all engineers pretty much were involved in our project. So we figure if these guys can't make the thing work, then we've got to go back to the [INAUDIBLE].

BLONDIN: You're kind of on the tail end of the distribution group. It's dropping rather rapidly.

[LAUGHTER]

BLONDIN: If you don't do it quick, there'll be nothing left.

[LAUGHTER]

MINDELL: So Sandy will show you some of the documents. and hopefully by later today we'll have the web working. We can do a demo of the actual comment site. And as usual with programmers, it's a little more sophisticated than it needs to be. And we're spending a lot of time beating on them, trying to tell them. If the engineer with 40 years of experience can't make the thing work, then what are the chances that a material scientist is going make it work or a biologist?

HALL: Or even an expert on the Apollo computer.

[LAUGHTER]

MINDELL: Well, exactly.

BLONDIN: Is this a scientific endeavor or a historical endeavor? Are you people historians or scientists?

MINDELL: Well, that's a good-- I'm actually both a control engineer and an historian. And so some of the background for this project comes from I'm just publishing a book on the history of control engineering from 1915 to 1948, which is all sort of before classical control theory really kind of jelled and has a lot of the early Draper stuff during the Second World War, with the Mark 14 gun site and a lot of computing in a whole bunch of different ways. And basically it's turned out to be mostly antiaircraft fire control and early radar during the Second World War. And that's been a seven- or eight-year project that I've been working on. And coming to the close of that project a couple of years ago, we sort of decided what's next. And I'd always thought that the right way to end that book would have been with Apollo because it was a very logical, consistent set of progressions there. Cline's actually read the book.

FRASIER: I was going to say, I highly recommend the book when it comes out. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. They gave it to me to read because I worked on antiaircraft fire control systems that he's had in the book.

MINDELL: And if I had gone all the way through Apollo, it would have been 1,000 pages instead of 500 pages, and nobody at all would have read it. And so what we're doing here is sort of-- we're going to skip a little bit in the middle, unfortunately.

POUNDSTONE: Your book is all analog.

MINDELL: It's actually about-- it's about the role that control engineering played in the emergence of digital computing and about how people began to think about the relationship between analog and digital, in the context of design and control systems.

FRASIER: A lot of history about Doc and Webb, and the interaction is Sperry, too, that I found very interesting. I read Webb's book, the biography of Webb just before. And how it all fit together was quite--

MINDELL: And a big part of it is manufacturing. And one of my arguments in the book is you can't really understand this history until you look at the manufacturing issues that came up. Because during the Second World War, a big reason that people started moving toward electronic analog computing had less to do with anything like accuracy or speed. It had everything to do with the problems of manufacturing mechanical computers and at that time, the relative ease of having Western Electric build the computers instead of people like Chrysler.

So we've extended that basic approach into this project. And we're saying, the Apollo computer is generally under appreciated by historians of computing because all they tend to care about is architecture. And they sort of work out of this very abstracted framework. And we're looking at it saying, we think the Apollo computer's important for several different reasons.

Obviously the integrated circuits aspect of it is important, the general manufacturing aspects, the human-machine interface control systems, et cetera, et cetera. And so in some way, this is the climactic chapter of what's sort of a century-long development of feedback control computing human-machine interface and advanced manufacturing techniques for controlling vehicles of various types.

HALL: And have you seen the latest Scientific American and their article about the development, or the history of the development of PCs?

MINDELL: Uh-uh.

HALL: It's interesting, except they've completely ignored just what you said about the Apollo computer. I would think it was one of the first that really had human interaction with a visual computer, and they don't even mention it. But there's other interesting things in there. It goes way back to Whirlwind.

MINDELL: I will check that out. It is-- I mean, we're trying to change the categories so that people think about history [INAUDIBLE].

POUNDSTONE: From a manufacturing point of view, to talk about the evolution of Apollo, you really have to start with Polaris.

SPEAKER: Exactly. Yeah, that's why I wish--

POUNDSTONE: It was the genesis of-- not only from a manufacturing technology, but from the people. Those guys all worked on Polaris.

MINDELL: And one thing we're very interested in is the people side of it, actually, because there, again, people are far too easy--

POUNDSTONE: Stay out of that.

MINDELL: Well, we went into politics too. People tend to be far too simple about looking at influences of technology. They say here's a computer. What was the influence? And they go, what other computers did people design with that computer?

As opposed to saying, here's a project. People built this project. What did those people learn from the project? And how did that carry on in the rest of their careers or in starting a company or later projects they did? This is something that actually-- when I was at NASA last week, they're very interested about this project because they're always being pinged on to document their influence. And they have this really kind of dumb idea of spin-off. Like, the astronauts drink Tang, and then everybody on the ground drinks Tang. And there are some of those, but they're not nearly as significant as the companies who got involved in Apollo.

They did things in a new way. People learned things. They move on. And that's a lot harder to document. But it's a lot more meaningful because you got to follow the people around. And sometimes it's within the same company. Sometimes they move on to other companies. And so they were very interested in that part of this project. And as we go around, we'll ask you to introduce yourselves and say something about both how you got to the Apollo project, but also where your career went afterward. And we may, then, interview individually in more detail about this because we're very interested in exactly those kinds of developments.

BATES: Well, they can't fire us or put us in jail now.

[LAUGHTER]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

[LAUGHTER]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MINDELL: So the site is up on the web. How many of you have seen the site already? So a good number of you. And we'll send you the address. And it's about to be updated again. And what we'll do from today-- as you can see, we're recording it-- we're going to make a transcript. And we edit the transcript to make it a little more readable just because conversation tends to be very verbose. And we compress it a bit. And then we'll send it to you by email or however where you like so that before anything goes on the web that you've said, you have a chance to review it, correct to it, add to it, if you choose. And then we recompile it and put it on the web in this conversational format.

So sometimes people remember things that they didn't remember when they were here. And they go look something up. And so what you do see on the web-- everything that you see on the web from our previous conferences has been signed off on basically by the participants.

HALL: I didn't get a chance to do mine. And I need--

MINDELL: Oh, you haven't done yours? Okay.

HALL: I wasn't [INAUDIBLE]. I wasn't here--

MINDELL: Oh, right.

HALL: --when it was available. So I need to be able to do that.

MINDELL: Okay. We should talk to [INAUDIBLE] about that, who I thought I was going to be here today. So what I think we'd like to do to start, and it may take up a lot of the morning, is just have people go around and tell your own version of the story, or at least say who you are, what your background was, how you got here. We'll get into some of the more detailed stuff later-- where you worked, for how long. We have Raytheon people here and [? IL ?] people here. And so at least everybody here gets a sense of, if not a refresher for who else is there. And then when we complete that, we'll get into some specific questions.

But usually that process itself generates a lot of interesting conversation. And I'll be taking pictures just for conversation, the web-based part of the conversations so get a sense of what we're doing.

BATES: You got a time limit for each interview? Because we could stand here and sit forever.

MINDELL: Right. For the first go around, five minutes would be great. And then we can-- that'll certainly generate questions for us. And I think we'll start to hear patterns of [INAUDIBLE] things. And that'll enable us to get around the room and get a sense for who's here and [INAUDIBLE]. We can start here or wherever. Maybe Clyde, do you want to start?

FRASIER: Sure. I'm Cline Frasier. I got to the Apollo program by the Army and Sandia Corporation and then to NASA in Houston. Got involved with the guidance system work in about 1963. And my role into that was I was the instigator of the change of the spacecraft guidance and control system configuration from basically an analog system on both the command service module to using digital autopilot, and incurring Eldon's wrath because we moved from two guidance computers to one guidance computer in the process. And I talked for quite a while in the last interview.

So why don't I just let it go with that. Well, to add that, then from there I went on and ended up as the program manager for the guidance and control system, primary guidance and control system. As a result, I had a lot to do with MIT and with Raytheon and all the other people.

TURNER: I'm Bard Turner. And I kind of go way back to the Polaris days. I worked for Raytheon Chapel Street in Newton, who were, at that time, making tubes, welding. And this was back when the lab had started repackaging the Polaris guidance computer, which was all discrete, into what was called cord wood modules and welding rather than soldering them. And so that was sort of my entry.

I was sent by Raytheon as a resident and working for Ed Duggan doing design work on this thing because I had applied for it.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

TURNER: Polaris, yeah. In fact, I have-- this really, as Jack said, goes back. This is really the start of the basic physical organization of the Apollo. In other words, the concepts that we learned on Polaris really was the one that tracked the key points up through Apollo.

So when that Polaris program was done, I did leave Raytheon and went to work for the lab directly, just at the start of the Apollo program. And was pretty close to the design of the logic section of the Apollo computer.

From the first version, I have two modules here, which was the Block one Which still retained a welded interconnect, but it had the micrologic integrated circuit NOR gates back in the cans, to the final version, which was interconnected with the multi-layer boards, which were hard to make, and made by one place, mainly, in Virginia.

And significant also, backline interconnected with an automatic wiring machine made by Gardner Denver in Michigan, and clearly was involved with the transition over the Raytheon, to the manufacturer.

So I have been around this program all the way back to before Apollo, which was Polaris. So that's where I am.

BATES: Yes, my name is Dave Bates. I go before Polaris. When I got drafted in the Army and sent to Huntsville, Alabama, they took it any guy that was a mechanical engineer that came from Sperry Gyroscope must know all about gyroscopes, which show was kind of difficult, because I was a structural engineer.

But anyway, I was assigned to the guidance and control laboratory under Dr. Heusermann, and I was in charge of the guidance and control laboratory from a military standpoint.

MINDELL: Could you just back up a little bit?

BATES: Sure.

MINDELL: When were you at Sperry, and where, and what'd you work on?

BATES: I was at Sperry from about '53 to '55. Got drafted in the Army and sent to Huntsville, and I was lieutenant the Army in charge of the guidance and control laboratory, as I said.

We were working on the Redstone, Jupiter, Pershing. And as you probably well know, Von Braun was very much interested in space exploration, so we were building the explorer satellite in the back room.

So I worked on that and a program for Hardtack, which was an atomic firing of a Redstone missile. They would always revert back to the V-2 type of hardware, so it was kind of difficult to work as to what was going on.

So the old Redstone computers were analog, and they used ball and disk integrators, which held me from the standpoint of being on the mechanical side.

MINDELL: Ford Instrument Company make those?

BATES: Pardon?

MINDELL: Was it Ford who made it?

BATES: Ford Instrument Company made the first ones, yes. In Long Island City. So then what happened, was the Navy got interested in the Polaris program, and they decided that they were going to use the Jupiter A-- we had the Jupiter A, B, and C.

The Jupiter B was the first forerunner of Polaris, the Mariner ships, and they were first talking about taking a Jupiter missile and putting it aboard a ship. Aboard a submarine, which is kind of ridiculous, because they used liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and air-bearing gyros, which made it rather difficult.

My job through this whole thing was not only from the mechanical engineering standpoint, but when the head of the project office had a heart attack, I went over and took over the project office for Von Braun, and for the people there.

So I was assigned the job of working with the Navy to try to determine how the Jupiter B would be utilized in the next generation of Polaris. And I worked with all the people that came down from the Instrumentation Laboratory, like Davey Hoag and Ralph Ragan, and the rest of them. And the people in the Navy, like Sam Porter.

So what happened was that the Navy decided that, since the Army was having a problem with the Air Force on a Jupiter versus the Thor, that they would pull out. And so they pulled out of the Army in Huntsville, but we kept an awful lot of the people down there in Huntsville to work on the program.

One of them, Jim Matthews, who finally came with me to Raytheon, worked on the early guidance scheme from the standpoint of the trajectory, and what was going to be done. And actually, he was the guy that worked with Dahlgren and determined those equations.

When I got to my end of time at the Army, they wanted to stay there, but my home was in Boston. So I took a job at GE in Pittsfield, who had the Polaris program, and I was program manager for the Polaris guidance system. At that time we had the Mark 1 system, working with the Draper Laboratory, and that was an instrumentation laboratory during that time.

My main responsibility was the coordination of all the components from the standpoint of the first EA there was worked on with the Mark 1, and then all of the IMU, which we built at GE in Pittsfield.

The next thing was, when Polaris Mark 2 came, we kept on going. The situation became, it didn't look like Polaris was going to go much further than that. The guy that hired me for GE in Pittsfield knew I came from Huntsville. He came down and worked for Raytheon.

The problem that Raytheon had at that time, and also the Instrumentation Laboratory, was a working relationship between Nasa Huntsville and NASA Houston. I, having been a NASA Huntsville for a long time, and being in charge of the guidance and control laboratory, knew the people down in Huntsville.

So I was hired in my first stint in marketing and advanced program development to work at Raytheon, to look at how Raytheon could work with both Houston and with Huntsville. So it got to be more a working relationship and an interface to try and do that.

So I work well with customers, and with the people who are building the hardware and designing the hardware, which included the Instrumentation Laboratory and the people in Waltham, and the rest of it. I went through a number of jobs in that area, but finally ended up working for Jack Poundstone in the area of advanced program development. I retired about 10 years ago, and now I'm a consultant to a number of companies. That's about it. That's all. And I did it in less than five minutes.

POUNDSTONE: [INAUDIBLE]

MINDELL: Yeah, those comments. The Sperry gyroscope is of great interest to me, because a lot of the first book is about the Sperry gyroscope and Ford, and the relationship--

BATES: I'll bring in one of his first auto-pilots. I bought it as junk at $5 a pound.

MINDELL: I bought a Mark 14 gunsight. A brand new for $100 on eBay. It's in my office downstairs, actually.

BATES: That's how I learned about gyros, because you could blow into the end of this thing, and you could see the way that the gyro was precessing when you moved the thing.

POUNDSTONE: Has anyone looked on eBay to see if there's an Apollo computer there?

MINDELL: I have actually looked there. There's a lot of little junk. Some of the really big auction houses, like Christie's, have auctioned hardware, but it's all a glove here, and a mission card there.

BATES: As a side thing, they had come down to Huntsville at one time, to the museum that's down there, and go up into the third floor and look at all the hardware. And if you've never seen a lot of junk, there's a lot of junk up there.

And you'd go around and you'd point at each one, and what it was. The AB-5s, the old gyros, the all accelerometers, the old lateral and range computers. What we used-- LEV-3 was the old platform for the Germans on the V-2.

MINDELL: This is on display, or in their back room?

BATES: In their back room, but there are some on display, now that they've figured out what they are.

MINDELL: I've been there, but not for a long time.

BATES: There is a blockhouse that you can go to with the Cape, which you can get into, which has got an old LED-3 system in it, plus a whole bunch of hardware. And they use it for VIPs. I brought, who was it, Dennis in there, one time. So unless my memory goes bad, you can have me for historical stuff.

MINDELL: I'd love to.

POUNDSTONE: All right, my name is Jack Poundstone. I got on the Apollo program by another devious route. I was a graduate mining engineer from West Virginia University. And after spending about a year, year and a half as a sales engineer crawling around in the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia, I decided that wasn't the thing do.

I went in the Army, got drafted, or volunteered for the draft. And through a bunch of strange circumstances, I ended up in Huntsville at the missile guidance school down there.

I ended up being an instructor teaching guidance on the Corporal missile, and also on the Nike-- I guess it was Nike Ajax, I think. Corporal had an analog computers doing everything, so I sort of cut my teeth on analog computers, in those days.

When I got out of the Army I went to work for the Westinghouse in Baltimore, and I worked on the Bomarc project, which was a very early missile program for this country. And the Bomarc was one of the first digital computers being used. You may recall that IBM had a big computer in Kingston, New York, I guess it was, SAGE, and they were somehow processing all the radar data that came out of Eglund Air Force Base.

But my job was developing simulators, because the IBM computer was so far behind in schedule, there was no way you'd eve be able to test this missile without something to simulate those computers. So I got a touch of working in physical computers there.

And subsequently, after four years there, and getting a high school degree in electrical engineering, I went on to a small company in Huntsville for about six months. And when NASA was formed and Huntsville almost died, it seemed like it was time to leave. And I ended up working with Raytheon up in New England. And I got there probably about a month or two after they had gotten their first Polaris contract.

So I was probably the only guy in the Raytheon company, at that time, who'd ever heard of the word digital computer. It was a very analog kind of company. So I was sort of in the right place at the right time.

Since Raytheon got the contract to be an industrial support contractor to MIT instrumentation lab, I ended up working with Eldon Hall starting almost from the day I got there. And I was a project engineer Raytheon, providing support to the instrumentation lab and the development of Polaris. And ultimately, we produced the machine in our manufacturing plant, and, as several people have said, the evolution of Apollo really started from Polaris.

So when Apollo came along, after Doc Draper had done such a great job of getting Draper the responsibility for the guidance system on a sole source basis, without a competition, they decided they needed some industrial support contractors. There were several aspects of the program, the IMU, the computer, some of the analog electronics, quite a few things.

So we ended up bidding on it, and thanks to a gentleman across the table, Mr. Hall, Raytheon was able to win that contract, and I then became the Raytheon technical director for our efforts to support Draper and Apollo. And I spent four years on that program doing everything that had to be done to make sure that all of the resources at Raytheon were applied to the program as effectively as they could be. I spent four years that-- I don't even remember my kids. We worked so hard.

And after that, I became so close to Draper Lab, that I became-- well, they said I didn't have the right attitude, or something like that. Because NASA had decided to organize the program. After we'd been gone for four years, it was time to get organized. So they took Raytheon and Kollsman, who were contractors for the optics, and said they had to be subcontractors to AC Spark Plug. And that was done by decree.

So we did that. The contractual arrangements changed, but Eldon and I kept doing the same thing we'd been doing for years, which was to try to get the job done, and do it in an efficient manner. And after a few months, AC Spark Plug decided that I was much too close to Draper Labs, so they fired me, or they told me to get off the program.

Now that was probably the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, because I got off just as all the fun was over, and was able to get onto the Poseiden program and the rest of the Navy programs, when a lot of people here got stuck in a program that was sort of going downhill.

But anyway, at the time, I thought it was earth-shattering. But certainly, Apollo was a wonderful experience. I have never seen such a group of dedicated, hardworking people that work between the contractors and the instrumentation lab, at that time. I don't know if NASA ever appreciated how hard everybody worked, but they certainly did. And successes come from it.

I've got a lot of pictures here, we can show maybe at a later time, but maybe that's good enough for the biographical sketch. Mr. AC Spark Plug is now up.

SPEAKER: We'd even forgotten he worked for them.

BLONDIN: My name is Ed Blondin. I got involved with Apollo in the early '60s. I was superintendent of manufacturing at AC Spark Plug in Milwaukee, which was the defense electronics division of General Motors. It was odd, because we'd go down to Cape Canaveral, they'd say, where are you from? We'd say, AC Spark Plug, and they'd say, what are you contributing? Spark plugs. Big ones.

I was working on all the manufacturing tests for the Titan program, and the Apollo program at AC Electronics, where we built the IMU and we integrated the IMU with the new with the optics and the computer, was behind schedule. And behind schedule mostly because we were not producing welded, encapsulated modules fast enough.

So I got transferred over to that, and about a year after that we were back on schedule, and we had tested our first guidance system. We also made the ground control equipment. Tested that, and tested our first production system, and we were shut down because we didn't have computers.

So Hugh Brady was our program manager at AC Electronics, we had changed the name by then. Later on we changed it again, to Delco Electronics. I wasn't there at that time. Hugh would ask me to come here to be in residence at the manufacturing arm of Raytheon in Waltham. I was delighted to do that, because I had grown up in the area, I went to Boston College.

And I came out here and it was a real culture shock for me. I was used to the General Motors production ethic, which was things moved from manufacturing. And the worst curse that could happen anywhere was shut a line down.

And I got out here, and I found out that this was like getting something through Congress. We had NASA, and we had MIT, and we had Raytheon, and we had my bosses back in Milwaukee. But I got to know some people in a hurry, and I found that was the key. Eldon Hall was one of them, and he goes down in my book as one of the finest gentlemen I've met.

Cline Frasier was outstanding. If you had to buck something to Cline Frasier, he would make a decision. That was not something that was easily done. There were an awful lot of people who seemed to feel that it was their job to say what all the reasons were why you shouldn't do so something. Lots of them.

But finally, you had to dig out what your options were and you had to move. And Cline Frasier was excellent, and my boss, Hugh Brady, was good. And at the time I got involved with Apollo and Raytheon, Jack Poundstone had just got transferred off, and so I didn't get a chance to meet him much. At that time our program manager was a guy named Bill Kurtz, I don't know whatever happened to him.

BATES: He's down in Arizona. I saw him, he moved down there from Colorado.

BLONDIN: He'd come out of the Navy, was a Navy captain, and he worked for another guy named Gus Guidi. Gus was the second person on whom AC Electronics pulled the trigger.

POUNDSTONE: I was the first. Gus told me to leave, then they told him.

BLONDIN: Apparently we had a clause in our contract that said that we had approval of Raytheon program managers. And Gus was one of those guys that just loved stirring up trouble. He was a brilliant guy, and everything was in a constant state of argument. So it wasn't long before AC asked Raytheon to remove him, and he got out of there.

And they put another guy in as head program manager, Ron Greenslade, another real gentleman. From this point on, I'm dealing with Ron Greenslade, Hugh Brady, Cline Frasier, Eldon Hall. It didn't matter how many different hats they were wearing, things moved.

I also found out how critical it was that the hands-on manufacturing people were properly used. It wasn't long after I got here-- I got here '66, early '66-- when Raytheon went on strike. And they had that strike for years, and it was a total shock. And I remember driving into the plant with picket signs, but we had a sign in our window that said Apollo. And the lines would part, people said, oh, the Feds, and let us in.

They tried building the Apollo components at Waltham with supervisors, industrial engineers, foremen, people that allegedly had experience on it, especially on these memories, these ropes. Scrap, just everything they made was scrap. I also found out that welding these modules, which, on the surface, seemed easy-- you took the jig, put it between two electrodes, came down with a foot pedal, and the machine was programmed to apply the right amount of pressure and the right amount of current, and you got a weld. More scrap.

There was a technique, how you positioned it, and when your hand shook, and these female operators were good at, and those that stood around telling them what to do were terrible at it. I remember, we had to suddenly rebuild all these memories. There was apparently a vibration problem.

I didn't know what it was, but I knew that MIT was writing a new program, and we had to get them out within three weeks, I think it was. We had to get them to NASA in three weeks, or we were going to scrub a flight. And then, you'd think this is automated. We had x-y tables that positioned these cores exactly between a couple of cores where you passed a needle through. It was like a spinning wheel with a wire on it. You'd think you could just-- but you couldn't, you needed those girls-- little old ladies-- who wound those ropes.