I had a non-standard "hi res" 640x400 interlaced display on my Sperry PC that used a long-persistence phosphor to help make up for the interlacing. For many uses, it was wonderful. For white on blue text like this (which I tried because it matched my Atari 800), it gave me a headache in pretty short order.
Consider a system like a PDP-8 with magnetic core memory. When you powered it on, memory had the same contents it had when powered off. You give the CPU an address of your favorite program in memory, start the CPU running, and you're off.
Of course, if you don't have anything useful in memory, you've got to do something about that. Which is why, sticking with the PDP-8 family, the PDP-8i had the machine code (in octal) for a paper tape loader printed on the front of the system for you to toggle into core with your binary switches.
"Mike Stewart has developed gate accurate FPGA replicas of the AGC and its test hardware. It represents a massive amount of work. If you are Mike, you can use it to fly the real missions, and simulate every signal in the AGC. Making this work is not for the faint or heart and requires intimate understanding of the AGC hardware and software. We offer no instructions and no support."
For the communications project specifically (and also a couple of other projects we have going on), I combined the FPGA AGC and the Monitor into a single design that runs on a Digilent Cmod A7-35T: https://github.com/thewonderidiot/cmod_agc
It's a lot cheaper and more accessible in this form, and much easier to integrate into projects that need AGC stand-ins.
Aside from the FPGA design though, yeah, all of the AGC software and the assembler is in the VirtualAGC repository.
The classic example of this was Bob Hoover, who poured iced tea in his Rockwell Shrike Commander twin-engine propeller airplane while completing a barrel roll with both engines shut down (gliding).
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