Examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle’s I/O Processor

According to the Adafruit Blog, hardware analyst Ken Shirriff has been reverse-engineering the I/O Processor circuit boards from the Space Shuttle program. These weren't simple controllers — each computer consisted of two sixty-pound aluminum boxes that performed critical work: firing the engines, reading thousands of sensor inputs, driving the astronauts' displays, and handling in-flight navigation. Examining this vintage NASA hardware reveals how space-era engineers solved real-time computing challenges decades before modern microprocessors.

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