Ancient Web: Fran's Electronics Writing Unpacked an Apollo Computer Board

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Fran Blanche's archive of design and engineering writing has an unusual attraction: the person explaining a machine often has its disassembled parts spread across her own workbench.

Visit Fran's Writings on Design and Engineering.

The site organizes a science blog through pages of densely packed, hand-linked titles. The index was updated in January 2017 and preserves entries dated from 2010 through 2015, spanning experiments with vacuum tubes, Nixie displays, radio construction, circuit boards, old computers, musical equipment, and mechanical curiosities. It also connects to Blanche's Frantone electronics work and later video projects.

A computer that went to the Moon, taken apart

The standout collection is the Apollo Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer project. Blanche acquired an actual LVDC circuit board associated with the Saturn V rocket's Instrument Unit, then began investigating the unfamiliar logic technology. Her project history reaches from a December 2010 introduction through X-ray photographs in 2013 and component tests in 2014.

A viewer later donated a badly weathered LVDC board for destructive investigation, with the understanding that it would be passed on to other engineers after Blanche finished her work. Instead of acting like a conventional collector guarding an irreplaceable item, she wanted to expose its construction and share what could be learned.

The written account includes the frustrations: removing potting compound from miniature circuitry could dislodge tiny semiconductor dies, while damaged deposited resistors sometimes made measurements impossible. She compared the board with IBM System/360 technology but discovered important differences in device packaging and circuit arrangements. A subsequent test built a working model of an AND gate from ordinary discrete parts.

Elsewhere, the main index points to Selectric typewriter maintenance, a homebuilt microscope, soldering projects, experimental lighting, and work restoring a mechanical automaton. Some old links redirect to newer article formats or video platforms, so the archive is not a frozen 1994 homepage.

Its preservation value is instead the continuity of an individual's engineering notebook: a record of what objects were studied, how assumptions changed, and which experiments failed before revealing something useful.

Explore the LVDC investigations and linked project archive.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.