posted January 13, 2005 06:35 PM               

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.

...Mr. Pultorak spent close to $3,000 and worked about 10 hours a week for four years, mostly in the evenings and on weekends. When it was finished, in October, he spent two months detailing his travails in documents that totaled over 1,000 pages, and he made them available at his Web site.