Mainframes vs PCs (was Re: discrete transistors)

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Tue Oct 20 11:49:39 1998

"My laptop has more computer power than NASA used to put men on the moon."

Is usually used in the context of the ground based computers not the flight
computers. The wonderful HTTP link that was given out here on the report of
Computers at NASA is quite informative and contains the following information:

        During Gemini-Apollo the ground system computers consisted of
        five 7094 mainframes each configured with 64K of memory
        524K of "auxillary" storage and a 1401 as a front end.

For the actual moon-landing flights (post 1966) the information is less
clear, its clear that some of the 7094's were augmented/replaced with two
360/75's each with 1M of memory and 4M of auxillary store. It is unclear
from the document how many of the 7094s were retired, some of them (the
paper mentions, "the remaining 7094s").

So for this statement to be true your laptop computer would have to be able
to outperform dual IBM 360/75's, some number of 7094s (up to three I
guess), and have more (5 + 5 + .5 + .5 + .5 + .5) 12MB of memory. Certainly
possible for a P5 laptop, it wasn't as clear for a 486 machine.

--Chuck
Received on Tue Oct 20 1998 - 11:49:39 BST