CuriousMarc

CuriousMarc is the channel of Marc Verdiell, who restores exceptional vintage electronics. He is best known for working with a small team, including Ken Shirriff, Mike Stewart and Carl Claunch, to restore a real Apollo Guidance Computer, the machine that helped land astronauts on the Moon.

The videos document restorations of early computers, space hardware, mechanical calculators, Teletypes and classic Hewlett-Packard test equipment. Things rarely work at the start, and each episode shows the patient fault finding needed to get them going. Recent series look at the hand controllers used to fly Apollo spacecraft.

Some highlights include:

The team examines a real, broken Apollo DSKY, the display and keyboard astronauts used to talk to the guidance computer.

Microsoft’s very first product is loaded from paper tape and run on an Altair 8800, an early home computer.

A look at how an Apollo-era computer was used in an early fly-by-wire aircraft control system.

The channel has around 245,000 subscribers.

CuriousMarc shows how engineers diagnose problems in complex systems, one signal at a time. It is a good way into electronic engineering, computer engineering and aerospace. It also shows how much the engineers of the 1960s achieved with limited technology. Each restoration uses real test equipment, such as oscilloscopes and signal analysers, so viewers see how engineers measure and prove what is happening inside a circuit.