Moon Landing

[Past_it]

Saw this, made me laugh.

"My phone has more Processing power than the Computers NASA used to fake the Moon Landings"

 

[ProfJohnL]

Apparently the NASA Apollo computer on the moon lander had less than 8kb of working memory, which was less than the Sinclair ZX81 home computer. A renown colleague of mine was celebrating his birthday. Another colleague sent him a birthday card that sang to him 'happy Birthday' He was found statring at the card, and was noted for saying that the card had more processing power that the moon lander.

 

[JohnGriffiths]

If that was what NASA was making do with just imagine what the Russians were doing. The story I heard was that most of their guidance and flight control systems were simple clockwork mechanisms,and rather than spend millions developing pens that work in zero gravity they used pencils, but that might be an urban myth.

When I started programming our first lab computer in the 70s, each user had a 2kb of memory, with a total of 32kb in the machine. More than 20 people could use it simultaneously though, as the operating system simply switched out dormant jobs to disk. It could handle very complex tasks but the difference was no fancy user interfaces, thats what eats up the memory and processing power.

Oh, and to all those who think the moon landings were faked, do you really think the Russians didn't track within a few metres exactly where the US spacecraft were. Would they have kept it to themselves if they were picking up the moon broadcasts from the direction of the Mohave desert rather than the moon? I don't think so.

 

[Past_it]

I wish I could have a quick day trip to the moon, there are one or two Hasselblad cameras left there in mint condition.

 

[JohnGriffiths]

You're assuming the martians haven't already collected them!