by Cyrus Farivar
Some people climb mountains to achieve greatness. Some people try to win championship sports games. John Pultorak built a working replica of a 40-year-old computer.
Late last year, Mr. Pultorak, of Highlands Ranch, Colo., completed a four-year project, a reconstruction of the Apollo Guidance Computer.
The A.G.C. was onboard for many of the Apollo space missions from 1969 to 1972. It was the computer that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins used in the command and lunar modules during the Apollo 11 mission, which landed on the moon on July 20, 1969.
“I was looking for something that would be a challenging thing, a really outrageous kind of project,” said Mr. Pultorak, 51, a software engineer for the space systems group at Lockheed Martin. He compared his quest to that of a person who aspires to climb a mountain “just to see if they can achieve it.”
“I wanted to build something that was really distinctive – the computerized version of Mount Everest or the Super Bowl,” he said.
