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Just found out my old laptop from 2012 has more raw processing power than the Apollo guidance computer
I was reading this article about the Apollo 11 mission on Ars Technica and it said the guidance computer only had about 64KB of memory. My first real laptop had 4GB of RAM... that's like 60,000 times more. Kinda wild how far we've come in just 50 years, right? Anyone else ever stop and think about that?
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shane_morgan2mo ago
Yeah, charlieh74 nailed it with the "apples and space rockets" thing. People forget that computer was literally steering a spacecraft through the void with less memory than a text message has characters. Your laptop might be faster at running Chrome tabs but it would be dead weight if you strapped it to a Saturn V.
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charlieh742mo ago
Oh come on, you're comparing apples and space rockets here. The Apollo computer was literally built to survive the vacuum of space and radiation, while your 2012 laptop would probably blue screen if you sneezed on it. Yeah, the raw specs are laughable now, but that thing was running real-time navigation calculations with less memory than a single JPEG image. I'd argue the engineering challenge was way more serious back then than just throwing more RAM at the problem.
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