A transistorized shift register box, built in 1965 for Apollo testing

In my day job I do data pipeline development and operations. That involves a bunch of AWS services and some custom wrappers we developed in-house. I spend a lot of time clicking around in web interfaces.<p>Recently I have fantasized about what it would be like to operate my environment with something like the ACE control room.<p>Need to set a flag on some Spark option? That’s literally a switch. Is something on fire? Look for a flashing red light. Need to send the output of a task to some other process? That’s a knob.<p>I think about this both in terms of literally making a control panel&#x2F;room or a web interface equivalent.<p>A control room seems like something that needs a lot of forethought and deep understanding. How would that requirement along with the difficulty of pushing changes influence the design of a web interface?<p>Recently Ken obtained and shared some of the Roto-Tellite switches from mission control. Is that the 1960’s version of jQuery?

Author here for all your questions about obscure Apollo hardware :-)

What strikes me about a unit like that is how it&#x27;s just a small part in an undertaking where thousands of similar components had to be ready and interoperable within the decade.

I remember two versions of Finnish parliament voting machine. 1965 it was like restaurant refrigerator and 1975 it was just one wire-wrap board in a lunchbox. Never has there been such a giant leap in few years, methinks. And this is probably due to the Apollo program.

Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but they really did need such extreme measures against humidity etc then, right? The components we have today are better sealed, the materials are less likely to be affected by humidity, etc etc. Years of marginal improvements in epoxies mostly I think.

Perhaps this was the inspiration for Boundary Scan (IEEE-1149.1) also known as JTAG.