The announcement last year that Bill Moggridge was selected to be the new head of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York gave me pause. In my daily work I tend to stay on a narrow path of aerospace-related topics, but that name sounded familiar.

Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York.

A glance at my bookshelf gave me the answer: before joining the Cooper-Hewitt, Moggridge was a co-founder of the international design firm IDEO, and while there he played a crucial role in the design of the world’s first laptop computer: the GRiD Compass, first marketed in 1982. The unusual capitalization of “GRiD” was a trademark of the company that developed it. I knew about the Compass because that device was also the first laptop flown in space. According to a press release from GRiD Systems, Inc., “The GRiD Compass was first used on the Space Shuttle mission launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 28, 1983. The computer, code-named SPOC (Shuttle Portable On-Board Computer) by NASA was slightly modified for operation in a weightless environment…” (Neither this press release nor any from NASA notes the similarity between the acronym and the better-known character from the television series Star Trek.)

The National Air and Space Museum has several GRiD compass computers in its collections, including one that has flown on two Shuttle flights, STS-35 and STS-36. The modifications were minor: the attachment of pieces of Velcro to fasten it to various places on the flight deck, a modification of the power cord to plug into the Shuttle’s power supply, and the addition of a small fan to compensate for the lack of convective cooling in zero-G. A lot of custom work went into the development of specialized software, however: to aid Shuttle astronauts in managing their mission and assisting with navigation, and as a back-up to prepare the vehicle for return to Earth. As with every item carried on the Shuttle, the software had to be rigorously tested before it was loaded onto the computer.

STS-46 Mission Specialist Franklin R. Chang-Diaz works with GRiD 'Compass' laptop on the middeck of Atlantis, Orbiter Vehicle 104.

To return to its design: the GRiD pioneered the so-called “clamshell” case for laptops, but it also had several unique qualities. Its case was made of rugged magnesium, not plastic. It had no rotating disk, which might have caused reliability problems; but rather a “bubble” memory that had no moving parts. And it used a custom, bright orange “electro-luminescent display, visible in the brightest sunlight. It is a beautiful machine to hold, and a testament to Moggridge’s, and GRiD Systems’ attention to detail. Laptop computers are nothing special today—they seem to be giving way to smaller devices including smart phones—but this one is special.

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At 64 pounds, the shuttle's general purpose computers are heavier than several modern desktop machines combined. However, they can operate for years without failing, a reliability mark that is no accident. Engineers spend months making sure any change to a computer or its software is tested repeatedly.Photo credit: NASA
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The shuttle GPCs were upgraded in 1991, and the system that used to take two boxes, right, could run on one, left. Photo credit: NASA
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STS-132 Commander Ken Ham works with the keypad that is connected to the shuttle's primary avionics system. The GPCs operate in several formats to fly the shuttle, including the phases of on-orbit operations. Photo credit: NASA
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Laptops are set up to help astronauts in space with several tasks that demand anything from geographic representations of Earth and spacecraft for rendezvous operations to word processing and email. Here, STS-125 Commander Scott Altman works on the flight deck near two laptops that were set up. Photo credit: NASA.
› View Larger ImageAstronaut Scott Horowitz uses an early laptop to run a landing simulator program called PILOT. Photo credit: NASA.
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The space shuttle's five general purpose computers computers, or GPCs, are slow and have little memory compared to modern home computers. On the other hand, no one straps the latest-and-greatest desktop computer inside a machine that vibrates like an old truck on a washboard road while requiring it to get a spacecraft into orbit and back safely.
In other words, when it comes to flying the shuttle, reliability means far more than performance.
'The environment of space is very harsh and unfriendly and not just space, but getting into space,' said Roscoe Ferguson, a space shuttle flight software operating system engineer for the United Space Alliance. 'Something like a desktop might not even survive all the vibration. Then once you get into space you have the radiation.'
Even after a major computer upgrade in 1991, the primary flight system has a storage capacity of one megabyte and runs at a speed of 1.4 million instructions per second. While this was more memory and much faster computing speed than could be achieved with the original 1970s-era Shuttle flight computers, it doesn't compare to today's desktop computers.
'The GPCs serve as the brains of the space shuttle,' Ferguson said. 'It’s really the heart of the control system.'
The GPCs include 24 input/output links that collect the signals from the shuttle's myriad sensors and sends them to the GPCs. The computers plug the readings from the sensors into elaborate mathematical algorithms to determine when to swivel the three main engines during launch, how much to move the elevons on the wings for landing and which thrusters to fire in space to set up a rendezvous with the International Space Station, for example. That process is completed about 25 times every second.
The shuttle's computer-driven flight control system was a first for a production spacecraft. The fly-by-wire design, tested on modified research aircraft, does not have any mechanical links from the pilot to the control surfaces and thrusters. Instead, the pilot moves the control stick in the cockpit and the computers transmit signals to the control mechanisms to make them move.
The shuttle system is so dependent on computers that a fraction of a second without them could be catastrophic during the critical parts of flight.
'We have a range where if you can't control the vehicle for 120 milliseconds, you could lose the vehicle,' said Andrew Klausman, the United Space Alliance technical manager for the backup flight system and multifunction electronic display subsystem. He's been working with the shuttle computers since 1986.
That's why engineers put so much time into testing and improving the system. A software change typically goes through about nine months of in-house simulator testing and then another six months of testing in a unique NASA lab before it is accepted for flight. The results of the strenuous testing regimen? Well, it has been 24 years since the last time a software problem required an on-orbit fix during a mission. In the last 12 years, only three software errors have appeared during a flight. But perhaps the most meaningful statistic is that a software error has never endangered the crew, shuttle or a mission's success.
'The current quality of this software system is really almost unimaginable,' said USA's Jim Orr, who has been work

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