Apollo 11 turns 50 years old today

[Jludo]

If you are ever close to the cape you need to visit the building housing a complete Saturn V vehicle. It is on its side in the stages sectioned out for you to see. The lunar modules as well. Those men flew to the moon in a phone booth with an on board computer that is seriously lacking. Landed. Took off. Found and rendezvous with the orbiting vehicle and made it back home.

There's a whole one in Houston too, looks like they just layed it down and built a pole barn around it in the middle of a field. You can also go inside and sit in the observation deck of the original mission control room. There's also one of the shuttle's sitting on a 747 you can tour out front.

 

[Alamo]

I'm glad he got to see the 50th Anniversary:

Christopher Kraft, NASA Mission Control’s Founding Father, Dies at 95

 

[DoggyDaddy]

If you are ever close to the cape you need to visit the building housing a complete Saturn V vehicle. It is on its side in the stages sectioned out for you to see. The lunar modules as well. Those men flew to the moon in a phone booth with an on board computer that is seriously lacking. Landed. Took off. Found and rendezvous with the orbiting vehicle and made it back home.

And to think the computing power in your cell phone far outpaces the computing power they had available at the time.

 

[actaeon277]

And to think the computing power in your cell phone far outpaces the computing power they had available at the time.

Yes. But the Apollo computer did ONE thing.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

Yes. But the Apollo computer did ONE thing.

And did it well.

 

[JettaKnight]

And to think the computing power in your cell phone far outpaces the computing power they had available at the time.

The computer in your car's door pod connected to the lock & windows switches is far more powerful than the on-board guidance computer. For a quarter, you can buy an microcontroller that exceed the paper specs x4.


If you're talking about the ground based, massive computers, I can't really say, I don't know what NASA had at the time.

 

[Alamo]

And did it well.

well, the command module one. The lunar module computer was maxed out during the first moon landing and spitting out error messages.

https://www.space.com/26593-apollo-11-moon-landing-scariest-moments.html

ETA: Apparently the CM and the LM used the same hardware:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

2K RAM, 36K ROM, about 1 cubic foot in volume, 70lbs. Keyboard and display purchased separately.

 

[DoggyDaddy]

well, the command module one. The lunar module computer was maxed out during the first moon landing and spitting out error messages.

https://www.space.com/26593-apollo-11-moon-landing-scariest-moments.html

ETA: Apparently the CM and the LM used the same hardware:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

2K RAM, 36K ROM, about 1 cubic foot in volume, 70lbs. Keyboard and display purchased separately.

Yet today we talk in terms of gigabytes or even terabytes. We've come a long way baby!

 

[Alpo]

Yet today we talk in terms of gigabytes or even terabytes. We've come a long way baby!

a system we sold in the 80's held 1.2 terabytes and cost around $250,000. That's now about $120 with access time 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster.

 

[churchmouse]

And to think the computing power in your cell phone far outpaces the computing power they had available at the time.

The fella standing by the modules said that a hand held calculator in current times had more available computing power than the on board Guidance system.

Seriously, how these men did this is just amazing. At one point on the tour there were a couple of the in flight note books with a crap load of math scribbled in them.

 

[churchmouse]

There's a whole one in Houston too, looks like they just layed it down and built a pole barn around it in the middle of a field. You can also go inside and sit in the observation deck of the original mission control room. There's also one of the shuttle's sitting on a 747 you can tour out front.

That is pretty much what they did in Florida. The entire package is sectioned out so you can see inside of it. There is a Shuttle outside that you can go in but very limited access.
They have a control room at the cape that looks functional and puts on a 10 minute show re-creating a launch with actual recordings.
I loved it.

 

[Alamo]

Yet today we talk in terms of gigabytes or even terabytes. We've come a long way baby!

When I was studying computer science at Indiana U 10 years after The Landing memory was still more expensive than programming and I was taught via assembly language to cram the minimum amount of code necessary to do the job into very limited storage. Using punch cards.

Some of the AWACS planes at my first assignment in the USAF had genuine core memory - little pieces of iron and copper wire.

It wasn’t just a different time, sometimes it seems like a different planet.