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Complex Numbers #964311 added August 17, 2019 at 12:07am
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Circuits... in SPACE
https://www.fastcompany.com/90362562/this-computer-changed-world-youve-never-hea...
Yeah, I know the moon landing anniversary was last month. But the internet is forever.
This computer changed the world—and you’ve never heard about it
NASA needed a supercomputer to get us to the Moon, and it had to be generations ahead of the state of the art at the time.
Well... I had heard about it, but fair enough. I wanted to learn more.
Your dishwasher has more brain power than the computer that flew the Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
I don't know about that - you haven't met her.
If anyone could design the computer and instruments to fly to the Moon, NASA thought, it was MIT.
Besides, hey, grad students = free labor!
The computer not only needed to work; it needed to work perfectly. The very lives of the astronauts depended on it.
Fortunately, Bill Gates was barely out of diapers at the time.
But in 1969, a computer that made its own decisions was unique.
Fifty years later, a human that makes its own decisions is unique. Need to decide something? There's an app for that.
The Apollo computer kept track of what it was working on at all times, and if something bad happened, it wiped its working memory clean and restarted seamlessly in ways that modern computers don’t do a particularly good job of (as anyone who has lost pages of a memo they were working on well knows).
That sounds like nirvana to me. This thing I'm typing on crashes, and it's ten minutes before I'm back up again. Ten minutes in low Earth orbit is a significant chunk of sky, about 1/10 of a circuit.
The Apollo computer would turn out to have a big impact back on Earth, although not an impact that is widely understood or acknowledged.
Anyone still think the space program didn't have tangible benefits?
On a personal note, I'm leaving for Vegas in a few hours. Don't know if I'll be able to do daily entries for the next few days. Not going to worry too much about it. So if you don't see something here, it's not you; it's me. |
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