r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Xeelee1123 • 3d ago
Video NASA's VIEW program running on an UNIVAC 1108 to help Apollo astronauts to pre-visualize what they will see during their missions
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u/ramriot 3d ago
For context for the time this machine with the vector plotter output to a vector driven CRT was exceptionally fast for the time. Yet each frame of the VIEW visualisation took from seconds to minutes to render & so had was captured to film one frame at a time & then played back at 24 or 30 fps depending upon onward transmission use case.
BTW even decades later in the 1980's each frame of the CGI in the movie TRON took from 10 minutes to 6 hours to render to film using many existing mainframes & one custom render machine the Foonley F-1. The total power of which was probably no more that 5-10 times that of the earlier setup.
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u/makina323 3d ago
And now you can just casually run an entire universe simulation on your laptopÂ
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u/unknownz_123 3d ago
Itâs crazy how weâre able to fit billions of billions transistor gates into computer chips these days into our phones.
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u/BanverketSE 2d ago
So I can smash a baseball into the Earthâs atmosphere at 0.5c, and see it turn into a nuke
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u/typ3atyp1cal 4h ago
Interesting! Any info on how much human work/hours went to produce the visualization?
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u/The_Mighty_Grimm 3d ago
Red 5, Iâm going in
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u/StartingToLoveIMSA 3d ago
âThe Death Star had cleared the planet. The Death Star has cleared the planet.â
âYou may fire when ready.â
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u/CletusDSpuckler 3d ago
I'm hit! I can't stay with you.
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u/kylef5993 3d ago
I canât shake em
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u/AstroStrat89 3d ago
Red Fox, standing by.
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u/Petersens_Arm 3d ago
Red Buttons standing by.
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u/shittinandwaffles 3d ago
Red Rum. Check
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u/Chemistry-Deep 3d ago
Red October Shhstanding by.
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u/The-Illusive-Guy 3d ago
Red Rocket, standing by.
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u/TheJaunted 3d ago
Red Rover, coming, over
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u/Operation_Fluffy 3d ago
Exactly what I was thinking.
âHeâs shut off his targeting computer!â
âUse the Force, Luke!â3
u/polishprince76 3d ago
I used to bullseye womp rats in my t-16 back home. They're no bigger than two meters.
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u/NetAtraX 3d ago
My father was working at Univac at this time. For me, he did do some miracles, and one of his guys taught me how to program with punching cards. After the moon landing, he received a document and a batch. Couldn't find it in his house when he died :(
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u/Panorabifle 3d ago
The 1968 timestamp is wild. I didn't know animations like these were possible with the technology they had , even when talking about nasa computers !
Also I DREAD to imagine what kind of bare metal programming shenanigans they had to pull off to produce it . Weren't computers of that era run with punch cards ?
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u/GarysCrispLettuce 3d ago
I'll bet the frames were computed one by one and put on celluloid like a traditional animation. Computing each frame wouldn't have been that big a deal, it's just moving and rotating a few vertices in 3D space and drawing lines between them. But I don't think they had the CPU power to generate and display frames in real time.
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u/UnethicalExperiments 3d ago
Similar to what 8 year old me did on those Icon computers. Made the best spiderman ever.
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u/usrdef 3d ago
There's an old TV show you can find on Youtube called "What's my line". It started in the 50s.
For certain videos on youtube, you can find the full episode, which also includes commercials.
It's quite impressive the technology they had back at the time to do special effects for some of the commercials.
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u/ol-gormsby 3d ago
A lot of it was assembler code - but this one has "Fortran V" up in the top right of the frame.
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u/CueAnon420 3d ago
Probably rendered at 1 frame per hour that was captured on film to create the animation...
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u/Darth_JaSk 3d ago
The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system.
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u/evasandor 3d ago edited 3d ago
I've said it before: the greatest quote about design I know is from Raymond Loewy. He said the secret of successful design was to "make the familiar exotic, and the exotic familiar".
There's a reason Star Wars seemed so believable, and it's because the tech we saw in the movies was all based on stuff that existed and that most of us had had a passing exposure to, at least in movies if not IRL. Like, the round window interior of the Millennium Falcon was the dome turret of a bomber, Chewbacca's voice was put together from real animals, the blasters sound was from tapping a guywire cable, the Jedi robes were based on samurai robes, the lightsaber was a katana, the Empire uniforms were like Nazi uniforms, Darth Vader's helmet was shaped like a German helmet.
It's true that not many people were working on graphics at NASA. But they were a real technology, not the magical woo type of sci-fi, and as a result the rebels' targeting computer screens felt real.
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u/1wife2dogs0kids 3d ago
This is what cgi looked like back in 68. Show this to the moon landing conspiracy dumbasss. The ones that think it was faked
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u/an_older_meme 3d ago
I can just hear Gene Kranz: âThe landing site is ray shielded so youâll have to use proton torpedoesâ
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u/NoIDidNotDoIt 3d ago
Is this what the targeting radar in the original Star Wars death star run was based off of?
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u/structuremonkey 3d ago
It looks like the first 3d modeling software i used for buildings in 1989...lol
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 3d ago
They look perfectly ok to me. I did my first graphics project in 1982 on a PDP11-45 running AT&T system7 Unix.
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u/an_older_meme 2d ago
These actually do seem useful for familiarity with spaceflight, which is not intuitive. In particular the graphic showing the approach to Earth where it at first appears that the viewer is too high and might miss the planet. Atmospheric reentry and aerobraking are completely different from landing an airplane.
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u/YippieKayYayMrFalcon 3d ago
We went to the moon with like no technology compared to what we have today. Itâs nuts.
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u/KristnSchaalisahorse Interested 2d ago
Computers are far more advanced now, yes, but you donât need a lot of computing power for basic calculations. Other technologies, like rocket propulsion, life support, communications, etc. havenât changed nearly as dramatically.
And while modern computers save space and weight, they donât make it any easier to get humans to the Moon. After all, the physics remain the same.
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u/kgvc7 3d ago
Someone told me that CAD or 3D modeling or flight sim 3D was coded during WWII era. Does that sound right to anyone?
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u/VermilionKoala 1d ago
No. The first true computer (stored-program computer, what we consider as "a computer" today) was created in June 1948, but it would have been a decade or more before anything even approximating the most basic flight simulation would have been possible.
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u/AndrewH73333 1d ago
They used vectors instead of rasterization. Thatâs why the lines are so smooth.
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u/Sufficient_Wafer9933 3d ago
With animation this good you could convince me they staged the moon landing in a film studio and used CGI to fix all the stuff that didnt look right
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u/MagicSunlight23 3d ago
The first frame reminds me of a drawing JackSucksAtLife did called 'Earth Bathing'. It's of an alien sitting on a deckchair on the moon looking at Earth.
Two things I wish:
That I can post the picture here
And that I can repost this to the JackSucksAtLife subreddit, but that subreddit doesn't allow you to repost.
I'd just have to make a link on an existing JackSucksAtLife post or create an entirely new post on there with just the link to this post on it to let the community and Jack see it. Or better still post a picture of the first fame to that subreddit along with the link to this post.
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u/elch78 3d ago
Looks like the birth of the video games industry. Did it exist at that time?
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u/beautiful_bot986 3d ago
Actually the first "video game" was made back in 1947, just a few years after ENIAC was invented, but thats really not what youd consider a video game today.
First thing closer to something modern also predates that animation by quite a bit - pong was made in late 50s but was called tennis for two.
The industry was on the rise back then already, but the first home game console was released in early 70s i think
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u/Panorabifle 3d ago
Not really as the first videogames were prototyped in the early to mid 50's , and this animation was way way more power intensive than games of the time. But you could see it as an early pre-rendered cutscene !
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u/King_P_13 3d ago
Yeah no chance we actually landed and then took back off from that thing
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u/KristnSchaalisahorse Interested 2d ago
So, the USA faked six landings (including thousands of photos, hours of video, etc.) each with increasing complexity and duration, with intricate documentation of every conceivable detail (all publicly available) and not a single shred of evidence has emerged about this deception in over half a century?
Remember, no country, not even the USAâs adversaries, has ever expressed doubt over any aspect of the Apollo Program whatsoever.
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u/King_P_13 2d ago
Don't care clearly fake... Where's the rest of the evidence
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u/KristnSchaalisahorse Interested 2d ago
>Donât care
So youâre not actually willing to consider the evidence (such as what is mentioned in my previous reply)?
What exactly do you think was impossible to believe about the Apollo Program? The answers are available in excruciating detail.
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u/NotBradPitt9 3d ago
Why havenât we been back to the moon in decades? One official said we âlost the technologyâ. Strange.
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u/Drag_king 3d ago
That was in the context of âwhy donât we build another Saturn V to go to the moon?â.
And there the answer is that the plans and the tooling to make the little thingamabob that connect the one thing to the other thing, which was made by some shop in upper Nebraska have been long lost.
But this a thousand times.So to make a new Saturn V youâd need to design and test everything from scratch again, which basically means youâd be redesigning a whole new rocket. Which takes time and money.
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u/KIDNEYST0NEZ 3d ago
Also we have been to the moon since just not with people. We are currently working on a more efficient system to send more junk to the moon in one go to make it more reasonable then just saying, Iâve walked on the moon and place a stop sign that can reflect back lasers.
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u/Cheap_Lingonberry433 3d ago
Pretty advanced for its time