![]() ![]() Many scientific computers of the time used 24-bit or longer word lengths and, in general, the longer the word the better the precision of the calculations. The choice of a 1 6-bit word size was a careful one. As well as the DSKYs, the computer directly hooked to the inertial measurement unit and, in the CM, to the optical units. The DSKYs were 8 by 8 by 7 inches and weighed 17.5 pounds. In addition, a "mark" button was at the navigator's station to signal the computer when a star fix was being taken. Two DSKYs were in the CM, one on the main control panel and one near the optical instruments at the navigator's station. Crew members could communicate with either computer using display and keyboard units (DSKY, pronounced "disky"). The machine in the lunar module was identical. Block II measured 24 by 12.5 by 6 inches, weighed 70.1 pounds, and required 70 watts at 28 volts DC. The CM housed the computer in a lower equipment bay, near the navigator's station. Chapter Two - Computers On Board The Apollo Spacecraft - The Apollo guidance computer: Hardware The Apollo Guidance Computer was fairly compact for a computer of its time. Landing a man (or woman) on Mars should be a cinch.Computers in Spaceflight: The NASAExperience So, by these admittedly fudged calculations, a modern computer is roughly 100,000 times faster than the Apollo 11 computer. Obviously, things have moved on in the intervening years, but even if we assume that growth kept at a steady 10% then we’re looking at a new figure of around 97,000x. Plug that into the graph above and you’ll see an increase of just under 50,000 between 19. If we extrapolate back to 1969 and assume 25% improvements in single-threaded performance then that gives us a rough figure of 250x increase in speed from 1969 to 1995. Then we hit some physics-based limitations (and AMD/Intel started concentrating on multicore performance) and it slowed to 20% per year. Back in 2012, Canadian computer programmer Jeff Preshing crunched some SPECint (a cross-platform benchmark) numbers to show the improvements of single-threaded CPU performance between 19.Īs you can see, the first ten years or so saw explosive growth of around 50% per year. To give a better perspective, then, let’s try and compare apples with apples. And all through a series of push buttons and minimalist data displays, as shown below. It’s designed in tandem with software, and at this point we should give all due credit to NASA’s engineers for squeezing so much out of such a basic system. ![]() Here we hit yet another hurdle, because computing hardware doesn’t live on its own. ![]() 8,000 times faster then? It truly becomes meaningless.Ī more realistic measurement is always based on tasks: how much quicker could a modern computer perform a task than the Apollo 11 computer? We could simplify it and say a laptop with a 2GHz processor is roughly 2,000 times faster, but that ignores the fact that a modern laptop typically has a quad-core processor. A 1.024MHz processor with 2KB of RAM compares so poorly to the power inside a modern computer that it becomes ridiculous. The specifications of the Apollo 11 computer are laughable by modern standards. So how powerful was the Apollo 11 computer compared to today’s PCs? It was actually two men and a computer: the AGC, or Apollo Guidance Computer. 50 years ago, two men landed on the moon.
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