Astronauts

When Gary Kildall was putting the final touches on the Micro 73 it lacked a software best seller that would really put it on the map. Robyn remembered something that had briefly appeared in her mind after the Watergate alteration, but before the Apollo 17 alteration. When she described it to him Kildall was intrigued and set to work.

The program he came up with was a cross between a double-entry accounting worksheet and the 'Battleship' game. Columns were marked A through Z, rows were from 1 to 256, and where the columns and rows intersected, they formed cells designated A1, B9, C117, and so forth. The customer could enter data or formulas into any one of these cells, and each cell could reference data anywhere else on the worksheet. If the customer changed data in one cell, all the dependent cells would be quickly recalculated. Gary called this program 'Matrix'.

If a businessman wanted to find the answer to the question 'what will my long-term profits look like if I buy a second sheet metal cutting machine today?' he didn't have to hire a programmer to write a special program just to find out. He could just purchase a Micro. With a Micro running Matrix the fellow could sit in his office and fiddle with the numbers himself.

So when the Micro 73 hit the market in the spring it came bundled with punch tapes containing Matrix and an assortment of other applications such as a simple text editor. There was an 8008 assembler to allow savvy customers to create their own programs for the Micro, but in the main, everyone from small business owners to the CFOs of large corporations went to dealers and plonked down five C notes for 'one of those Matrix machines.' Every time they did, one of those five Benjamins was pure profit for Astrodyne. Three thousand units sold in '73.

Bill Gates developed a BASIC language interpreter for the Micro but as Robyn correctly foresaw it was too slow and it had very few takers.

Apollo 18 Secret military flight Charles M Duke Vance D. Brand Joe Engle LM-9 / LM-15 “Orbital Excusion Module” (OEM) CSM-111 Deal made to transfer Astrodyne Lunar Telescope to NASA control, NASA pretends to install it. Justification to fund Apollo 19 and 20 again.

Intel offered their next 8-bit microprocessor with plenty of time to be incorporated into Astrodyne's next computer. The 40-pin 8080 could address 64KB of memory all at once and it had four times the clock speed of the earlier chip. The new model of the Micro switched to magnetic cassette tapes for program storage and shipped with 16 KB of RAM. An external floppy drive was sold by a third party and Basic Operating System Software, or BOSS, was written by Kildall to allow the Micro to manage this device as well as any printers or other peripherals. Soon after the Micro-74 actually hit the street, a four kilobyte 8080 interpreted BASIC was written by Bill Gates for the new version of Astrodyne's computer. It sold for $500 on floppy disks. Most potential customers considered that price to be outrageous. The first 'tappers' to appear made their name by breaking the copy protection on Gates' floppies, much to his dismay. Apollo 19

2/10/1974 LM-13 CSM-115 Deke Slayton 49 Thomas Mattingly, 37 Robert Parker, 37 First visit to Taurus City. Russians already present.

H4 - CROWDED MOON NASA rolls out the Nova expendable booster for the much larger payload of the Apollo 18 mission. At the invitation of President Ford, Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) took a hiatus from Washington to return to flight status with NASA. He flew on the Apollo 18 mission in a special non-partisan observer role for the United States government. Glenn had authority to make deals with the people already on the Moon who apparently were represented by Robyn Lokken. This was not public knowledge at the time. Glenn was not assigned a role as Command Module pilot or Lunar Module pilot, but he checked out on both. It was Richard Gordon who actually commanded the mission. He had already attained lunar orbit as the Command Module pilot for Apollo 12 but never walked on the moon. He landed on the surface with Glenn and Fred Haise, who had almost walked on the Moon once before for Apollo 13 but had to turn back around following an explosion. Vance Brand and William Pogue were space virgins. They stood port and starboard watch aboard the Command Module in lunar orbit for the three weeks the teams were separated. The Soviet Union transmitted to NASA the orbital elements for their Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl which parked over the Moon about a week before Apollo 18 arrived. They said the craft was currently unmanned and didn't want the risk of a collision, no matter how remote. The part about the LOK being "currently" unmanned was strange, but the Soviets refused to elaborate. Soon after Glenn, Gordon, and Haise landed, an electric truck identical to the one photographed by Harrison Schmitt arrived at the landing site and stopped. After that, the truck driver found the frequency the astronauts were using to talk to Mission Control and suggested, in English but with a Russian accent, that they follow him in their rover. Glenn and Gordon agreed to go, and Haise was left behind to watch the Lunar Module. The route they took was like a long dirt ramp up the North Massif, but all the up-climbing took a toll on the battery of the Lunar Rover. At about the eight mile mark, Gordon got on the radio and said they'd have to turn around to recharge, or the rover would run out of juice. The Russian voice suggested it wouldn't be a problem and they should keep going. After thirteen miles, with many switchbacks, they rounded a hillock and saw something like a wide garage door, which opened at the command of the lead truck. Both vehicles entered, and the garage door shut behind them. It took about an hour to fill the space with oxygen, then two men got out of the truck wearing jumpsuits and boots, nothing more. Aleksei Leonov and Oleg Makarov! Richard Gordon said. I recognize both of you from photographs in our briefing. I knew you were out here but I didn't know you were landing. Where's your LK? No LK, Commander, Leonov said. Astrodyne. We hitch ride down here. There were brief introductions all the way around, then Makarov attached a power cable to the truck. He brought another power cable over to the Lunar Rover, and offered to plug it in, but first he had to convince Gordon it was safe. What sold Gordon was how the cable fitting was exactly tailored to fit the rover. Someone up here had done their research. The next space after the garage was literally a locker room, with large lockers for the NASA crew to stow their pressure suits and keep the keys on their person. Makarov said, This key for peace of mind, no? And the space after that opened on a balcony looking down upon the vast green interior of Taurus City, lit by clever sun reflectors in the ceiling. Damn that air smells good, said Senator Glenn, taking a big breath. It better smell good, Leonov said. We pay for each lungful. They say, go fetch Americans, reduce line item on expense account.

Astronaut John Glenn and junior Senator from Ohio, reactived to flight status at the request of President Ford to find out what the hell's going on up there on the Moon. Senator John Glenn, it really is an honor to meet you,' Jill said. I'm not sure it's such an honor anymore, he said ruefully. It seems I wasn't the first American to orbit the Earth after all. And you are? My name is Jill Pennell. If you were looking for Robyn, she's not here. Do you have authority to make agreements with the United States? I remain in constant contact with one who does. My companion Ambe has no such authority but she must attend this meeting, and she must also feed her son Gordon, so I hope you don't mind if she nurses him right here. It's okay, that's natural. What's his name, if I might ask? Gordon Aspin, the same as the last name of your mission commander. And Aleksei Leonov, thank you for agreeing to be here as well. This big boy is my own son, Hunky. He's here because he's so damn cute, people can't resist doing whatever he asks. I once told him a story about a faraway kingdom where they treated a princess the same way, but that was just to make her feel good. Hunky here is the real deal, that's how cute he is. Leonov and Glenn chuckled at this, but by the end of the session they would not find it funny at all. Jill also chose not to reveal that Hunky had been born in 1974 but had spent three years growing up in the Land We Know, so he was older than one would normally guess from the calendar. Glenn said, This city you name Taurus is a truly amazing accomplishment, Miss Pennell, but what puzzles me is how you dug this big hole. I don't even see removed soil piled up nearby. There should be mountains of it. We have a way to turn normal matter into what we call dark matter, Jill revealed. We call it dark because it doesn't interact with light. So chemistry doesn't apply to it anymore. It just goes away, sinks to the center of the moon or flies away into space. Works great for trash too. That is a very important discovery, Glenn said. You must share. Unfortunately, no. We are a group of very disgruntled American citizens, Senator Glenn. I've had to dodge federal bullets myself, for one thing. But think of the possibilities! Roads, tunnels, we could save taxpayers billions of dollars. I'm afraid I must insist on this one point, Miss Pennell. Astrodyne must share this discovery with the American people. Nothing personal, but we have a variety of ways to encourage compliance. Mister Man, Hunky said, could you please stop bothering my mom? For you, son, anything. Sorry Jill, I withdraw my demand. There is one important thing, however. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says non-governmental activities, such as your group, obviously, must operate under the approval and authority of a state which is signatory to the Treaty. I can tell you now he US would only extend such recognition quid pro quo. Commander Leonov, do you think Astrodyne could be placed under the legal penumbra of the Soviet Union to satisfy this treaty? No, I think this request impossible, out of question, Leonov said. Mister Man, Hunky said to Leonov, Pleeeeeeese? Very adorable child, Miss Pennell. Tell you what. Give us photos and names of people here, birthdays, I take home to Star City, maybe Kremlin. Who knows? Maybe next Korabl bring Soviet passports.

NERVA - Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. NERVA XE design completed, but the program was defunded. Now the funding has been restored. The Apollo 20 mission will have a modified CSM with a nuclear engine. To be left in cis-lunar space after return of command module capsule to Earth, to prevent radiation from raining down on Earth during reentry. B'nei Elohim suggest topping off the tanks of propellant at Midway, so the nuclear service module could return to Midway after ferrying the capsule on a descent trajectory to Earth, then handing the service module over to the B'nei Elohim as payment in kind for allowing the US to keep an observer at Midway and another at Taurus City.

The Micro 75 was the first to have a modem, sold separately. It crawled at only 300 baud but users were able to dial out to Astrodyne for support and downloads. The host was the minicomputer in Maple Valley. A 24 hour news aggregator called Interworld was started with free access for anyone owning a Micro. For the marquee application on this version, Gary Kildall's and his stable of five programmers created WordBoss, the first word processor with automatic hyphenation and paragraph justification, leaving the user free to just type. Dot-matrix printer support was also added. Every year the Micro became thirty percent smaller in size, yet the price-point remained, as always, at $499. Twenty thousand Micros 75s sold, mostly to business and hobbyists, but the public at large was not yet aware of the growing world of micro-computing. Apollo 20 1975 LM-14 CSM-115a Last launch of the Saturn V. Thornton stays behind at Taurus City, makes regular television appearances from an elaborate set built for the purpose of simulating a space observatory. Rendezvous with Midway, refueled per agreement. ASM-1 enters descent ellipse, separation of Command Module, Nuclear Service Module returns to Midway by remote control. Stafford remains at Midway. First public announcement of existence of Midway. Thomas Stafford Bruce McCandless William Thornton

Every year the Micro became thirty percent smaller in size, yet the price-point remained, as always, at $499. Twenty thousand Micros 75s sold, mostly to business and hobbyists, but the public at large was not yet aware of the growing world of micro-computing. A 4 inch floppy disk drive with 128KB of space was incorporated inside the Micro 76. The cassette tape deck was dropped, but it was still available as an external device for legacy software. BOSS was changed to load from floppy, permitting fresh upgrades to the operating system. The 8080 chip was replaced by the Zilog Z80, an improved aftermarket clone. Astrodyne populated the motherboard with 32 Kb of RAM and it still came in at $499. An optional GUI called GUIDE (Graphical User Interface with Desktop Elements) ran on top of BOSS, in black and white. But the first truly 'What You See Is What You Get' (WYSIWYG) word processor, WordGuide, was the big star of the Micro-76 show. A spooler program converted documents for output on dot matrix printers exactly as they appeared on the screen, allowing for an endless variety of fonts. With a 1200 baud modem built right in, Micro 76s were able to communicate with each other point-to-point rather than just back to Astrodyne's mainframe, so email, data, and software could be copied directly between any two machines. That raised certain legal issues. The US government ordered Astrodyne to disable point-to-point file transfers to prevent piracy, but Astrodyne won in court using the argument that it was like trying to sue General Motors because the getaway car in a bank robbery happened to be a Chevy. A quarter of a million Micro 76 units were sold. Astrodyne bought out the whole strip mall at the southwest corner of SR-169 and SR-516 in Washington State, and built a proper business park and replaced their minicomputer with big iron. Meanwhile the US blocked Micros for export lest the technology aid the Soviet Union. Astrodyne was flattered, but all this really did was result in many Micros being manufactured off-shore rather than purely home-grown. Bill Gates tried to incorporate his own company as 'Micro-Soft' but he was sued by Astrodyne due to the similarity of names with their hardware and forced Gates to change the name of his company to Winspire. Nevertheless he kept going around saying he was 'W-I-N-N-I-N-G' and he did make a little money selling his BASIC interpreter. It made the Micro easier to program and was attractive to schools, but it was still too slow for serious work. Serious programmers compiled binaries which were directly executable by BOSS.

Prometheus 1 1976 Rusty Schweickhart William Pogue Karol Bobko Story Musgrave Rendezvous with Midway on way up, topped off with hydrogen. Thornton to Promethus, Bobko remains at Midway, antimatter operation revealed to Bobko by Stafford. Musgrave remains at Taurus. Schweickhart, Stafford, and Pogue return to Earth. AUS-1 (Advanced Upper Stage) has liquid hydrogen replenished at Midway and is transferred to Astrodyne after it is used to return the Command Module to Earth. Russian engineers at Taurus developing spacecraft on site.

The Micro 77 came with a 4800 baud modem, just fast enough listen to spoken word news commentary. The GUIDE interface used four bit color for the first time. A paint program was included to create images, but 16 colors was not quite good enough for photographs. A five megabyte external hard drive was also available for another $499. The 'killer' application for the Micro-77 was a new markup language that could turn simple text files into eye-pleasing documents featuring portions of text highlighted in green with an underline. If the user placed a trackball cursor over this green text and clicked, they were taken to a new document that could be stored locally, or on the Astrodyne server, or even on another Micro that was currently online. Winspire reverse-engineered the Micro's operating system and offered IBM something they called DOSS with only cosmetic changes to BOSS. Gates dared Astrodyne to sue. Soon after that, IBM began to offer a competing 'Personal Computer' using stock components and Winspire BASIC in ROM for all software and disk operations. There was nothing like GUIDE yet, but IBM blew that off by claiming a GUI was just for people too stupid to remember a measly set of two hundred DOSS shell commands and all their options. IBM considered GUIDE a toy for consumers and not for serious computing. The federal government deliberately purchased only IBM PCs despite the inferior quality and $1,500 per unit price, but they were very nearly the sole customer. Gates offered a ripoff of Matrix called Electronic Paper whose sole difference was cells labelled by rows and columns rather than like in Battleship. Judith Margolies had failed to get a software patent, and refused to do so on principle, saying it was like getting a patent on the quadratic formula. Gates, however, did get a patent for Electronic Paper, then turned around and sued Astrodyne. The government testified as a 'friend of the court', but the suit got tossed out by an 'activist judge' who was 'legislating from the bench' when Astrodyne showed prior art. Meanwhile the Micro 77 moved over four million units. The Micro had been transformed from a mere toy for hobbyists or a business tool into a genuine appliance for consumers. Prometheus 2 1977 Owen Garriot Stuart Roosa Robert Crippen William Lenore Bobko replaced by Crippen at Midway. Lenore stays at Taurus with Musgrave from the previous mission. During the pass-down Bobko reveals to Crippen that Midway is used to mine positrons ejected from the sun or from interstellar space which are trapped by the radiation belt and cluster in the "safe gap" where Midway lies. They are injected into molecules of C60, which traps them safely inside, and can hold enough to make the molecules up to nine percent heavier. C60 forms small brown mineral chips. When heated in an electric ark the positrons escape and render up enormous energy.

A five megabyte hard drive was built right into the hardware of the Micro 78 for permanent storage, and BOSS now booted from the hard drive. Graphics used 15 bit color, five bits each for red, green, and blue, for a total 32,768 possible colors. The internal modem attained 19,200 baud. Software, photos (mostly pornography) and electronic books were stored in small pieces across many computers in what soon came to be called the Swarm. Winspire's BASIC, which still shipped coded inside the Micro's system ROM, was now being cloned to RAM with a third-party tap called Ghostrider before being ran, which made BASIC run at least ten times faster and made it, therefore, almost usable. Bill Gates, CEO of Winspire, complained to the federal government that these transient RAM images represented a copyright violation, and the government responded by trying to shut down Ghostrider. They soon found it was impossible to track down every copy of Ghostrider in the Swarm. Instead they just seized the Astrodyne mainframe computer used to index files in the Swarm for search. Locked out from their own offices in Maple Valley, Astrodyne relocated to downtown Seattle. In reaction to the federal seizure of the mainframe, independent tappers created automated scripts to cruise and index the Swarm. Now, instead of a single vulnerable search node, the search nodes themselves become widely distributed. Astrodyne news and support services resumed after a short interruption, with the company itself becoming a normal user in the Swarm rather than a central node. Prometheus 3 1978 Edward Gibson Paul Weitz Charles Fullerton Don Lind Crippen replaced by Fullerton at Midway. Musgrave replaced by Lind at Taurus.

In 1979 Astrodyne rolled out a Micro with 32 bit color, giving over 24 million colors and finally reaching full photo quality. Onboard storage reached 64 megabytes and the modem attained 57,600 baud, the best that could be obtained by dial-up. Millions of users worldwide were now 'buzzing the Swarm' to communicate with each other. Suddenly there was a global library of information available to anyone with a Micro and a telephone line. Meanwhile Winspire offered IBM a nearly identical clone of GUIDE called Windows. Suddenly IBM stopped calling graphical interfaces mere toys. The IBM-PC was slashed in price to $1,200, hoping to jump start annual sales, which were still numbered in the hundreds. And even those paltry sales were mostly for government computers that were not even used, prompting some Winspire employees to call it Windows for Warehouses when they were out of earshot of Gates. The government tried a carrot- and-stick approach and offered a $750 subsidy to school districts if they purchased the IBM/Winspire boxes. They cut existing subsidies to school districts if they insisted on going with Micros. Sales of IBM's machine jumped to ten thousand units. But Astrodyne sold a thousand $499 Micros for every one unit sold by IBM. Gary Kildall decided to finally call Bill Gates on his bullshit and filed a lawsuit against Winspire for copyright infringement. Surprisingly, the case seemed to be placed on a fast track. Kildall found himself in front of Judge Samuel Watanabe in only a few months, not years. And if there ever was an open-and-shut case, this was it. GUIDE and Windows both consisted of exactly 51 files, and each file was exactly the same size, but with slightly different names. TASKSWAP.BIN in GUIDE became SWAPTASK.BIN in Windows. All Gates did was change the name of the file called out by the GUIDE kernel when it needed to scoot itself out of memory, which anyone could do with a simple editor without access to the original source code or recompiling. In the courtroom Kildall displayed the disassembled code of both operating systems to show they were absolutely identical except for when they called out one of the other fifty files. But the clincher was the Easter egg buried in the program by Gary Kildall for just this contingency. With Bill Gates' Windows product running with a projection monitor so everyone in the courtroom could see what he was doing, Gary put the trackball cursor in the upper left corner, then typed 'GOTCHA'. Suddenly a slideshow began to display cartoon versions of the GUIDE developers and in bold letters the text 'GUIDE Copyright 1979 Astrodynamics Corporation All Rights Reserved'. And Gary Kildall sat down, fully expecting the judge to ream Gates' ass and hand Winspire a multi-million dollar penalty. Nothing like that happened. To be sure, Judge Watanabe acknowledged that copyright infringement had taken place. 'Mistakes were made,' he said, pussyfooting around. The judge could hardly dismiss the case without being slapped down himself in the inevitable appeal. But Winspire was fined a dollar. One dollar. Judge Sam explained that brisk competition was commonly held to be a public good, and so Winspire, simply by offering an alternative to GUIDE and breaking the unfair monopoly in operating systems that Astrodyne currently enjoyed, had mitigated any damage to society they might 'theoretically' have done to Astrodyne's intellectual property rights. Astrodyne took retaliatory measures that would begin to bite the following year. Prometheus 4 1979 Joseph Kerwin Anthony England Henry Hartsfield Richard Truly Fullerton replaced by Hartsfield at Midway,. Lenore replaced by Truly at Taurus.

For the Micro 80 the modem, hard drive and floppy drives were completely removed, replaced by a little black box that was simply a locator for Chokhmah to place one end of a wormline linking back to something he called the 'Mother Node' deep inside his stellar body. Files were transferred and stored totally encrypted by Chokhmah himself. Even the latest BOSS operating system and GUIDE windowing environment were downloaded from the Mother Node at each boot, with on-the-fly decryption unpacking files during run time and absolutely goring Winspire's cash cow of reverse engineering. Customers could now carry just the keyboard unit (with a battery) and a headset and use their Micro as a telephone with no long-distance charges, or as a music player. Storage and bandwidth was effectively infinite and it was not even limited by the speed of light. This fact was soon exploited by stock Market traders until federal regulators caught on and implemented a sixty second delay for every trade. Movies as well as music began to be shared freely. Over a hundred million Micro 80s were sold. Thousands of songs and films became available in the Swarm for free, which soon impacted sales. The music and film industry realized it had a problem with a business model which depended on an artificial scarcity of content. Money sloshed around from lobbyists and soon Ford's Attorney General ordered Astrodyne to suspend all operations until they could be cleared of being accessory to Intellectual Property theft. Astrodyne complied with this order without filing for a stay in court or even a word of complaint, which all by itself sort of threw the government for a loop. The company suspended the manufacture of all new Micros in the United States, but continued to make and sell the units internationally, totally unabated. The value of unsold Micros already on retail shelves in the United States doubled overnight and would only go up from there. A thriving Micro smuggling trade appeared along the Canadian and Mexican borders. Machines that fell into disrepair were cannibalized for their black boxes to be retrofitted into older Micros or repurposed into local servers tied back into the Mother Node with older Micros networked to it. Micros were manufactured in Mexico, smuggled across the border, and arrived by ad hoc package delivery methods that could not be traced back to the source. With encryption firmly in place, Astrodyne then rolled out the concept of Microbux, electronic money which could be transformed to and from hard currency using local couriers for a nominal fee that included a small kickback to Astrodyne. Tappers tried their luck stealing Microbux, but Astrodyne guaranteed customers against any loss. They could certainly afford to do so, since Micros, as always, remained priced at $499 and the profit margin was huge. No tapper ever broke Chokhmah's encryption in any event. After this leap in technology the evolution of Astrodyne's hardware levelled off. Micros continued to grew incrementally smaller year-over-year, but the essentials remained the same. A classic Micro 80 would continue to work with the Swarm in the 1990s and far beyond. Meanwhile the United States government continued to put all their eggs in the Winspire basket. Redmond's systems never approached the technology of even the Micro 78 and they remained more expensive by a factor of at least three. None of them could access the Swarm. The Twenty-first Century arrived a generation early to citizens of even the poorest nations, who communicated with one another using video phones while the citizens of the United States remained mired in the 1970s as a deliberate policy of the Ford Administration.

Prometheus 5 1980 Gerald Carr Joseph Allen Robert Overmyer Jack Lousma Overmyer replaces Hartsfield at Midway. Lind replaced by Lousma at Taurus. Samael

Prometheus 6 1981 Ronald Evans Karl Henize Donald Peterson Fred Haise Join Truly and Lousma, six American astronauts on hand for the Moon War.