How Would You Like To Go To The Moon Depending On The Guidance Capabilities Of A Computer With A Hand Crank On Its Side?

An Old Posting Recalled...

Because I am old I am permitted under the International Rules of Blogging (Chapter 18, Page 15, Subsection 3b) to repost an old blog. This Old Blog Posting was sent out on July 9, 2018.

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In preparing for this bit of Foolishness, I found these 4 paragraphs...

On September 12, 1962, in front of a packed crowd in Rice University’s football stadium, President Kennedy was willing to propose the building of a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of a football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch.

In 1969 at the top of the Saturn Rocket was the Apollo spacecraft. One of the most important components inside of the Saturn was its guidance computer. The computer capacity of the mainframes in the Control Center [of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston] was smaller than that of the desktop systems of the 1980s, and the onboard computers in the command and lunar modules had less capacity than some pocket calculators.

The Apollo Guidance Computer, which weighed 70 pounds, had only 36K of RAM and 2K of ROM. But it was able to guide 27 men to the moon’s orbit and bring them back safely.

These billion-dollar satellites and spacecraft went into space with computational power that’s the equivalent of a Commodore 64 Home Computer (introduced in January 1982).

How Big Is Big?

A Million is big (a thousand thousand). Congress loves to spend Billions of Dollars (a thousand million). They are getting all too familiar with how easy it is to throw around Trillions of Dollars (a thousand billion). Once they find out that there is such a thing as a Quadrillion (a thousand trillion) all is lost.

In the world of computing there is a measure of computing speed called a Petaflop or the equivalent to One Thousand Trillion Calculations Each Second.

The Italian Oil Company ENI has a Supercomputer (the HPC4) that has capacity to do 18.6 Petaflops, and when combined with the existing HPC3, the system reaches a computational peak capacity of 22.4 Petaflops.

I may have lost you. Allow me to bring you back...

That’s 22.4 Thousand Trillion Calculations Each Second

If Apollo 11 had this kind of computing capacity it could have gone to the moon and back without leaving the launch pad.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: This reposting is being done on July 8, 2023. I bet computers are even faster now than they were when this Blog Posting was originally posted 5 years ago. If I said to a Real Computer Smartfella of today, "Can you believe it! There's a computer out there that can make 22.4 Thousand Trillion Calculations Each Second!" that Real Smartfella would say to this Imitation Smartfella, "That's nothing! The computers of today can...!"