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This may be a vague question, please let me know if more info is needed.
As we know, NASA put a man on the moon using technologies that we no longer use, like slide rules and entire teams of people performing very specific computations. What are some other obsolete technologies like that that these space agencies used during the 1950s to 1960s? I'd like to know as many as possible for a short story I have set in a spacecraft in the 1960s.
Everything has changed in the last 50+ years.
Every group working on space exploration had secretaries, lots and lots of secretaries, about one for every four to ten technical employees, plus many drafting assistants, and many computers. Here's a picture of 1950s era computers:
"Computer" used to be a human job title. The above image shows a room full of computers, mostly female. (Employers found that females were willing to work for less pay than were males.)
The first commercial calculators that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and store a single number came out in the early 1970s. Before then, intermediate results had to be recorded by pen (or pencil) and paper.
The C programming language was created in 1972. Before then, computers were programmed in assembly (shudder), FORTRAN (shudder), or Cobol (cringe). Waterfall management (shudder, again) was created in 1970. Agile programming was created in 2000. $\TeX$ was created in 1978, $\LaTeX$ in 1984. While Vannevar Bush foresaw the internet in 1945, the internet would not become a reality until the late 1960s (and we didn't have browsers until 1989 or so). How we write, create, collaborate, and communicate has changed many times over since the 1950s.
Rocket engines were hand-made in the 1950s. Many companies are now using 3D printing.
Everything has changed in the last 50+ years.
I would say Core Rope Memory
The Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first computers to made use of integrated circuits. It was light and small enough (roughly 70 pounds) to fit in the CM. One of its unique features was that it made use of core rope memory. With this technique the software was physically weaved into the storage of the computer.
If you want to know more about how core rope works I would suggest looking here.
Sending interdepartmental messages by pneumatic tube.
Image Credit - NASA
More info here.
If an individual flight controller wanted a paper printout of one of his console displays, like a SMEK-produced set of columns, he could depress the "Hard Copy Request" key on his control panel to signal the television subsystem's video recording equipment to tune itself to his display's current channel. The channel's signal was then routed through a hardcopy recording device, which produced a copy of the video signal's current image on thermal paper. The thermal printout was automatically stuffed into a carrier cylinder and shot through a pneumatic tube—much like the kind you'd find at a bank's drive-through teller window—and delivered to the controller's console.
The p-tubes weren't just for summoning hard copies. The system was a complex series of tubes connected by a sophisticated central switching station and could be used to ferry papers and other lightweight objects between console stations or to other points within the Mission Operations Wing.
Here's a few.
Here's a few more:
Of course I meant american/english units in abovepost not imperial units. Don't remember seeing any NASA docs in metric units. Shook hands with van Braun at a Huntsville meeting. He never said he despised american/english units. No one would lose a probe then by getting miles and kilometers mixed up.
Added one more big one:
tom kosvic
CRT screens.
They have all been replaced with LCD displays now.
The large wall mounted displays are projected from behind. Today they are projected from the front and the computer running them is about 1/100th the size it used to be, but the basic technology is the same.
Here are a couple of dead technologies that were front and center during that era.
There was no computer aided design.
Both mechanical design/drafting and electrical design/tapeup was all done manually on large (and sometimes HUGE) drawing tables using paper, velum and clear plastic sheets. Erasers were electrically powered! If you wanted a copy of something you made blueprint copy by running the original drawing thru a big machine that used an ammonia process and UV light. Copies were made one at a time.
To get a multi-layer circuit board the PC designer would use several sheets of clear plastic laid over a grid pattern and place scaled/shaped tape cutouts as needed to get pads. Tape of various precision widths and colors would be used to connect the circuits. Typically all black on one layer, red on another, then blue, etc. Since the plastic sheets would expand and contract with humidity and temperature it was very important to make sure the various sheets/layers maintained good enough registration.
Mechanical drafting was as much an art as a technical skill. There were armies of draftsmen in huge halls. It was not unusual for a single engineer to have 5 or 10 designers under him. (Yes... HIM.) Since there was no MCAD multi-part solid modeling all part fits and clearances had to be worked out by the engineers. Lots of leeway and slop was designed in wherever possible.
Also... finite element analysis was not yet in widespread use and so most calculations for strength, durability, fatigue had very generous factor of safety built in, resulting in parts being significantly overdesigned.
If a problem needed to be solved a group of people would grab rolls and rolls of blueprints, spread them out and begin furiously flipping from sheet to sheet to find where area they needed to be looking at.
