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I always like to think about the fact that they went to the moon in the 1960s. We're all a bunch of babies compared to what they pulled off then. "The on-board
by paloaltokid 10y ago
I always like to think about the fact that they went to the moon in the 1960s. We're all a bunch of babies compared to what they pulled off then.
"The on-board Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was about 1 cubic foot with 2K of 16-bit RAM and 36K of hard-wired core-rope memory with copper wires threaded or not threaded through tiny magnetic cores. The 16-bit words were generally 14 bits of data (or two op-codes), 1 sign bit, and 1 parity bit. The cycle time was 11.7 micro-seconds. Programming was done in assembly language and in an interpretive language, in reverse Polish."
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/739561/what-programming-languages-were-used-to-go-to-the-moon http://stackoverflow.com/questions/739561/what-programming-l...
- Retra 10y ago"Oh gee, people were so much more talented when they had to build a chair by hand rather than run a whole factory of chair building machines. If only those modern programmers working on LCH/ATLAS had the chops to compute some moon landing trajectories."
- jurjenh 10y agoI would say on the whole, yes - that is actually true. Now you only need one "smart" person to program up the machinery, whereas in the past you did need multiple skilled craftsmen in a variety of roles - not exactly apples vs apples, but I think that one of the unfortunate side effects of too much specialization is a lack of a broad knowledge base that lets you apply skills from one field in a different area.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]