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People saw plenty of value in more compute - what they didn’t see the need for was paying an astromical amount more for the same amount of compute to be miniatu
by danielvf 8y ago
People saw plenty of value in more compute - what they didn’t see the need for was paying an astromical amount more for the same amount of compute to be miniaturized.
For example, in 1964, the ATLAS computer went fully online in Manchester, England. It was the most powerful computer in the world, took up a floor of a university, and the word “supercomputer” was invented to describe it.
The requirements for the Apollo Guidance Computer were to make something with those approximate specs, but take up only 24×12.5×6.5 inches (61×32×17 cm), use 55 watts of power and be ready to fly in 1967. It was a crazy, impossible task.
I’m convinced the AGC was the biggest computing advance after the move general purpose computers.