The AGC/DSKY was unique. It would require ambition and talent to consider building one.

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I grew up in Atlanta. At the time I was a junior in high school with a brand new drivers license. I remember there were three locations; Decatur, Greenbriar, and Buckhead. I discovered the Greenbriar location when I was out one day driving to run an errand for my mom. I stopped in and got lost for a few hours. My mom was in a panic when I got home; she thought I’d gotten into an accident and was lying on the side of the road bleeding.

I got into the digital parts side of things because of Apollo and the Apollo Guidance Computer. The AGC was built entirely from RTL, nearly 3,000 Fairchild Semiconductor flatpack dual three-input NOR gates. In the back of my mind I had the crazy idea I could build my own if I could just afford enough surplus chips of the same type. Lafayette carried a lot of RTL chips, but not enough of the kind I needed, and even if they did buying enough of the chips as well as all the other hardware to build out the DSKY (Display Keyboard) with its expensive seven segment LED displays would have bankrupted me and my family.

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