What you're looking at is a hand-built "cartdridge" of massive proportions.
It's made out of two
sheets of plexiglass with a 1" thick wood border. The pile of
material at the bottom is a
"paper" tape made of mylar. The device at the top of the cabinet
(with the light on it) is the
paper tape reader. This is how the visual system loads a new
airport. The video computer
can only display 1024 *pixels* at one time. This is just enough for
the outline of the modeled
airport. This tape also contains navigational data such as local
NDBs and VOR stations.
Once you take off, there is no exterior visual at all. It's all IFR from then on.
This is the computer that actually drives the 727 simulator. It
handles all the aerodynamic
and engine simulation systems. The computer is a Honeywell DDP-124
and has 64K
words of 36 bit memory. It works out to be about 96K of "normal"
8 bit word memory.
The row of buttons along the front are used to directly program the
computer or to examine
memory locations.
Here is a closer view of the DDP-124 front panel.
The short row of white buttons in the center allow the programmer to
choose specific
CPU registers to read or deposit data into.