alt Hacker NewsYes, those engineering discussions must have been interesting. By that point people had a fair amount of experience in Earth orbit but between the relative newness of space and the relative newness of computers there must have been significant new engineering. Maybe the ICBM programs had some lessons.
The Polaris ballistic missile computer, developed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, was the predecessor to the Apollo Guidance Computer. It used germanium transistors along with magnetic core shift registers for memory. The Polaris computer used discrete three-input NOR gates, while the AGC used three-input NOR gates on integrated circuits. The book "Journey to the Moon" by Eldon Hall, creator of the AGC, has lots of details.