I was about to recommend CuriousMarc. I don't know where I found out about him, perhaps on HN, but watching someone knowledgeable geek out in depth about ancient computing (beyond the Apollo stuff) really does scratch an itch.
The main person behind that effort, as far as I know, is Mike Stewart, and there is an excellent video of him working on restoring original AGC hardware.
- photo #2 shows the construction of literally hand-weaved read-only memory for the 36,864 words of fixed program memory. Literally weaving wires through (or bypassing around) tiny magnetic cores for each bit of storage. Must be re-weaved for a new "build"
- photo #10 shows the prototype, occupying many many racks (not yet miniaturized!)
- photo #20 shows characteristics of the machine (2048 words of writable memory; 575us for a double-precision multiplication)
It does present addresses in hexadecimal, oddly. The computer was 15-bit and used octal in its display panel. I suppose the presenters thought the audience would understand hex better.
I once met a first year engineering student who was the daughter of a friend of mine. When she complained that you can do nothing cool with small computers, I pointed her to an article about this.
- watching https://www.youtube.com/c/CuriousMarc
- reading Ken's blog/twitter http://www.righto.com/ / https://twitter.com/kenshirriff