"Karl E. Peterson" <karl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Oh man, last time I was at the Cape (~1990), the tour guy was saying
> the computers in the lander weren't anywhere near as powerful as
> "today's PCs." <shudder>
Even then, that was a vast understatement! The first mainframe I wrote
production code for (though it was at the end of its life cycle) was the
IBM 1401 in 1968, a second generation (discrete transistors) computer.
This was less than a year before the first Apollo moon landing in 1969.
The clock on the 1401 was 1kHz and it had 8k (of 6bit) RAM. The
second mainframe that I wrote production code for, which was fairly
new at the time in 1969, was the Burroughs B3500, which had a clock
of 1MHz and 250k RAM. My current PC is 2 years old, and the clock
is 2,400 times the clock on the B3500, a typical business mainframe of
1969, and has about 8,500 times the RAM, plus dual core processors.
And you can bet that the computers on the Apollo missions weren't
remotely as powerful as a 1969 mainframe, because a mainframe in
1969 filled a large room and required a *lot* of air conditioning. The
Apollo computers were about as powerful as a 1950's mainframe like
the IBM 1401, with about 8k RAM and a 1kHz clock. Typical PCs of
1990 were thousands of times more powerful (MHz & MBytes vs. kHz
& kBytes). Even the pocket calculators of 1990 were more powerful
than that! My HP-48GX calculator has 128K ram, with sockets for up
to 256k more, and the copyright on it is 1993. The HP-48GX can do
symbolic algebra and calculus.
--
Judson McClendon judmc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."
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