That said, it would look much prettier thanks to advances in camera technology. But with the larger files we now send – and from greater and greater distances – to get an image from a spacecraft to Earth today will take relatively longer than it did in 1969. The actual time it takes to communicate is the same today as it was in 1969 – that is, the speed of light, which means that it takes 1.26 seconds for a message to get from the moon to Earth. Surprisingly, one thing that wouldn’t be better today is the communication speed with Earth. If that were not possible, due to having to wear gloves, the interface might be through gestures, eye movement or some other intuitive interface. It would almost certainly not have a keyboard, but would use swipe commands on a touch screen. Today’s interface would be a lot easier to use – which could matter in a stressful situation. The user interface (called Display Keyboard (DSKY)) had a calculator-type interface where commands had to be input using numerical codes.
This means that the iPhone in your pocket has over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.Īpollo Guidance Computer (AGC) Creative Commons Apple do not advertise the processing speed, but others have calculated it. The latest iPhone’s processor is estimated to run at about 2490 MHz. The Apollo 11 computer had a processor – an electronic circuit that performs operations on external data sources – which ran at 0.043 MHz. That is 4,398,046,511,104 bits, which is more seven million times more than that of the guidance computer.īut memory isn’t the only thing that matters. The iPhone also has up to 512GB of ROM memory. This is more than one million (1,048,576 to be exact) times more memory than the Apollo computer had in RAM.
To put that into more concrete terms, the latest phones typically have 4GB of RAM. Compare that to your mobile phone or an MP3 player and you can appreciate that they are able to store much more, often containing thousands of emails, songs and photographs. That means the Apollo 11 computer would not be able to store this article in its 32,768 bits of RAM.
#NASA PC RAM SERIES#
To the moon and beyond podcast series – TrailerĪ single alphabetical character – say an “a” or a “b” – typically requires eight bits to be stored. This memory is programmed and cannot be changed once it is finalised. In addition, it had 72KB of Read Only Memory (ROM), which is equivalent to 589,824 bits. This means that the Apollo computer had 32,768 bits of RAM memory. Each word comprised 16 binary digits (bits), with a bit being a zero or a one.
This type of memory is referred to as RAM (Random Access Memory). It had 2048 words of memory which could be used to store “temporary results” – data that is lost when there is no power. On board Apollo 11 was a computer called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
But is that true? And, if so, how much more powerful are our phones? After all, when we reflect on this historic event, it is often said that we now have more computing power in our pocket than the computer aboard Apollo 11 did. Despite the rapid technological advances since then, astronauts haven’t actually been back to the moon since 1972. Half a century later, the event is still one of the top achievements of humankind. Many people who are old enough to have experienced the first moon landing will vividly remember what it was like watching Neil Armstrong utter his famous quote: “ That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”.
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