According to the November '95 Popular Science, p88:
The Apollo 11 guidance computer had 2K of RAM and 36K of ROM, and
barreled along at 1 MHz. The circuits consisted of 24 modules
contained in two trays, weighed 70 pounds, and required 70 W of power.
To issue commands, the astronauts used a unique interface that
consisted of a number pad and an LED readout. Commands were issued
in "noun-verb" format; the astronauts would key in numbers that were
codes for commands like "display velocity" or "change program".
Nasa computers on the ground were somewhat more powerful, but not
much, according to Merritt Jones, a space physicist for the Gemini
and Apollo programs who now works for IBM. " The machine used in the
mission control center, which was the most powerful commercial machine
at the time, could execute 1 million instructions per second," he
recalls. "It cost $4 million
and took up most of the room. It had one megabyte of memory."
next comes a description of modern computers and how laptops can do
'90 Million Instructions per second and is small enough...'
>things into and out of memory rather than bothering the CPU with all
that.
>To facilitate this the mainframes typically have fairly complex
snooping
>caches for effective management of paging activity.
>
>The Crays and ConnectionMachines have, in the past, had the advantage
of
>being vector processors where typical mainframes were often SIMD
machines
>at best and simple pipelines at worst. Microprocessors caught up with
the
>SIMD wave with multi-ALU pipelining, and with the Katmai and AMD-K7
they
>will get many of the vector features that made so-called "super
computers"
>so fast.
>
>If you build a "PC" (Pentium II class) with 256MB of SDRAM and dual PCI
>based fast/wide SCSI controllers running to a striped RAID array of
"good"
>SCSI disks you can "beat" a lot of mainframes. Of course you best them
with
>a $10,000 PC.
>
>Back to classic computers, it has been said, perhaps apocryphylly(sp?),
>that "My laptop has more computer power than NASA used to put men on
the
>moon." While it may be true, I've never actually seen a description of
the
>computer resources available to NASA between 1962 and 1969. Does anyone
on
>the list have that information?
>
>--Chuck
>
>
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Received on Mon Oct 19 1998 - 19:55:02 BST