South African hacker saves first NASA computer in space

A Tshwane computer engineer has tracked down one of the great treasures of the computer age – the first space flight guidance computer, reports Gadget.co.za.

The computer belongs to Apollo-Saturn 202,”the very first Guidance and Navigation Control computer, used on a test flight of the Saturn 1B rocket and the Apollo Command and Service Modules”.

It had been lying dormant in storage for over 40 years (alongside other pieces of scrap) and it took painstaking gathering of a wide range of evidence, from documents to archived films to convince Rautenbach that he had found the real deal.

Rautenbach then quietly uploaded videos of his discovery to his Youtube channel, detailing his findings.

Check out the video below: