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Showing posts from April 26, 2008

Your old notebook alone is an overkill to send man to the moon

Remember Apollo 11? Apollo 11 took men to the moon and back safely. There were some computers on the rocket, the command module and the lunar module, vintage perhaps, but still capable computing power to take men to the moon and back no less. Working on the Apollo program were about 10,000 or more people: NASA employees and contractors. There were also a number of mainframe computers supporting the program, and to let all those 10,000 interact. In those days, there were no personal computers. Maybe a few leading edge engineers had electronic calculators . Nevertheless, they still sent men to the moon and back with all the stuff they had. Freely call any electronics that is capable of holding some charge RAM.  Call anything that is capable of doing some work on a clock cycle computing power.  Now, if you add up all the computing power in all the electronics, all the mainframes and whatever computers that were used, in mission control, launch control, the command module,