Computers and outer space have been inextricably linked since Sputnik launched the space age in 1957. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that computers were advanced enough to facilitate humanity’s most daring space adventure of landing on the Moon. The sweeping advances that made those missions possible ultimately shaped the way we use computers to stay connected around the world today.
Early on in the Apollo program’s development, NASA was already considering the computational might it would need to land men on the Moon. The space agency knew that it would need more than just computing power on the spacecraft, it would need a sophisticated and powerful network to deal with all the data of a lunar mission, one that could receive, manage, work with, and transfer all the information sent to the spacecraft as well as what was beamed back to Earth. With two spacecraft flying together a quarter-million miles away, there was going to be a lot of data.
To solve this problem, NASA turned to the International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. At the time, IBM’s 7090 series of mainframe computers formed the backbone of NASA’s mission control and data management for the Mercury and Gemini programs. As luck would have it, in 1964 when NASA was starting to figure out its Apollo needs, IBM unveiled its newest series of computers, called System 360 (S/360). The design incorporated IBM’s lessons learned from its early work with the space agency.
Almost as though anticipating NASA's needs, these computers weren't just singular systems, they could be networked together to build a multiprocessing system. The new computer’s operating system called OS/360 boasted a new ability to multitask. By the fall of 1966, NASA had twin 360s at the Goddard Spaceflight Center forming the basis of its new computing hub for Apollo missions.