If you take off the covers of your Autostar, you'll find that it contains a two-sided circuit board.
The key-side is hard to expose, and doesn't have much of interest on it.
It only has copper pads which the conductive rubber keys contact.
That's how it senses your keypressing.
Behind every key is a Light Emitting Diode (LED) to illuminate it.
The other side is where all the fun happens.
Here's a rough picture of the components you'd see with the back off:
Each rectangle in the picture is an integrated circuit, or "chip".
The main components are:
The computer portion of the Autostar is the Motorola 68HC11. That chip includes on-chip timers, parallel and serial ports and an analog-to-digital converter, which the Autostar uses to monitor the battery voltage. The 68hc11 is an "8-bit" chip. That means that its primary calculations are done with temporary storage of only +127 to -128. It also has three 16-bit temporary storage and computation "registers", each capable of holding integer (whole) numbers in the range of +32767 to -32768 (or 65536 if all possible states are assumed +). It can only directly access ("address" in computer-speak) 65536 bytes of memory at once. That's its "address space". So how does it handle a megabyte of firmware? By "mapping" the megabyte into 32Kbyte "pages". The 32KB ram always occupies the lower 32,768 addresses the 68hc11 can reach, or "page zero". The upper 32,768 addresses can be "overlaid" (or "mapped") with (or into) any 32KB piece of the Flash Ram. Similar to flipping pages in a book: whichever page is on top at the moment contains the text you'll see.
When the Autostar starts up, that lower 32KB ram is empty. The initial state of the Flash Ram map (part of a parallel port in the 68hc11) points to the page which has the Emergency Load instructions in it. The internal hardware of the 68hc11 starts by fetching data from the top two bytes of its address space. Those two bytes are the "Reset Address", the place in the memory where the 68hc11 will begin executing instructions. Each "page" of the Flash Ram contains the same data in the topmost locations. If you're not holding down the Scroll Up and Enter key as the 68hc11 starts working, those initialization instructions tell the 68hc11 to "map" the second 32KB of Flash Ram into the active page. That page contains 13,000 bytes of firmware which are used frequently enough (or which -always- need to be accessible, such as the page mapper itself) that they're moved into the lower 32KB ram for constant access.
There is one more specialized chunk of memory in the Autostar. It's in the 68hc11 itself: a 512 byte piece of EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory). That's where semi-permanent things like your Site, the previous star-up's date, your Owner Info, and the Telescope Setup data are stored. They also survive power-downs, but are eaiser to update on a byte-by-byte basis than the Flash Ram.