7 ms·
I always like the fact that the average musical birthday card, popular in the 90s had more compute capacity than the computer in the Apollo command module.
by Angostura 5y ago
I always like the fact that the average musical birthday card, popular in the 90s had more compute capacity than the computer in the Apollo command module.
- Eduard 5y agoI doubt.
- nl 5y agohttps://hackaday.com/2011/11/22/musical-greeting-card-with-minimal-parts/ https://hackaday.com/2011/11/22/musical-greeting-card-with-m... shows building a music card on an ATTiny 85. These are around 20 MIPS. The Apollo guidence computer had around 1 MIPS.
- kolinko 5y agoYou can build a music card on ATTiny, but music cards didn’t use ATTiny.
- nl 5y agoSure, but I couldn't find a teardown. It seems likely they are using something similar. It's difficult to find a cheaper chip, broadly available chip these days. You can find Z80 clones, but even they are generally upgraded and therefore more powerful than the Apollo computer.
- nl 5y agoWow the downvotes on this are pretty harsh! Do people really think the Apollo computer is more powerful? And have any evidence? I'd be surprised if you can get a microcontroller with as little processing power these days.
- kolinko 5y agoI think the downvotes come because you keep saying that music cards use microcontroles, when they do not. Music cards use dedicated chips, they are not general purpose, and they don’t really do much computation aside from a few counters. AFAIK. Now, in DIY tutorials they show microcontrollers, because they are easier to obtain, but it doesn’t mean that they are used in the commercial products.
- nl 5y agoI realise they don't use microcontrollers, but the Apollo Guidance Computer only had ~12,000 transistors[1]. The cheapest, smallest (15s storage) "chip corder" (which is what these cards use) has GPIO, SPI, the ability to trigger different messages etc. There's no way this is under 12,000 transistors![2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_co... [2] https://www.datasheets.com/en/part-details/isd2115ayyi-nuvoton-technology-corporation-61615792#datasheet https://www.datasheets.com/en/part-details/isd2115ayyi-nuvot...
- formerly_proven 5y agoThose ICs don't have any compute capacity at all. They're an analog oscillator driving an address counter connected to an OTP ROM whose data pins go into a DAC.
- rrrazdan 5y agoCitation please? That sounds unlikely!
- schlupa 5y agoMmmmh, AGC was not that low level. It was a 16 bit computer, running at 1Mhz with 72 Kb of ROM and 4 Kb of RAM.
- notwedtm 5y agoThis reminds me of the fact that 54% of all statistics are made up on the spot.