Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer

[gregmcc]

http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html

We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer. Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it.

Trying to mine Bitcoin on this 1960s computer seemed both pointless and anachronistic, so I had to give it a shot. Implementing the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code on this 15-bit computer was challenging, but I got it to work.

Unfortunately, the computer is so slow that it would take about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a Bitcoin block.

 

[gregmcc]

Very interesting read.


If you have a few hours to kill there also a pile of videos on how they restored the AGC.

 

[krieg]

Been following their progress for a long time, quite interesting.