Albert L. Hopkins

Who is Albert L. Hopkins?

Albert L. Hopkins worked at the US MIT Instrumentation Laboratory during the development of the Apollo Guidance, Navigation, and Control System, or the GN&C. The system was designed in two forms, one for the command module and one for the lunar module. The CM version included an optical system with an integrated scanning telescope and sextant for erecting and correcting the inertial platform. Albert Hopkins together with Ramon Alonso, and Hugh Blair-Smith was a member of the group that designed the computer, designated AGC for Apollo Guidance Computer, identical in the CM and LM.

The AGC was a 15-bit plus parity machine with a 1 MHz clock. It was about one cubic foot in volume and weighed about 80 pounds. It used integrated circuit NOR gates, two to a package, but integrated RAM and ROM devices had not been developed yet. It had 2,000 words of magnetic ferrite core read-write memory and maybe 24 thousand words of read-only memory in the form of magnetic core ropes. These cores used metal tape magnetic cores. With such limited computing resources, the software had to be extremely tightly written in assembly code.