4 ms·

I guess it was THAT much faster. That is an insane leap in performance in a decade. I know they are apples and oranges. One weighed about 150x more than the oth

I guess it was THAT much faster. That is an insane leap in performance in a decade. I know they are apples and oranges. One weighed about 150x more than the other, but still such a surprise to me.

jacquesm 3y ago
Seymour Cray was absolute genius. There are so many innovations in the Cray-1 that you could easily write a book about it. edit: some searching later: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/116196 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/116196
knorker 3y ago
They're not just apples and oranges, but apples vs differential equations. They had completely different requirements. Like ROM being sown for Apollo. You get something completely different if failure is not an option. But also yes, it is a big leap. NASA bootstrapped the semiconductor industry by buying up most of the world's supply. Without the Apollo program we may only just now have gotten smartphones. (And some people still think it's a waste of money. pff!)
- beerandt 3y ago
  Yeah, primarily minimize weight and power while meeting compute requirements. Excess compute in this case is bad design. The cray was 10,000 lb and 115 kilowatts. Not payload friendly. I'm imagining Kevin Bacon doing his Apollo 13 power budgeting scene, but needs another ~114kw.
  - knorker 3y ago
    Gary Sinise. Kevin Bacon had already had the measles, so he took his place. :-)
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > And some people still think it's a waste of money. Some of those people are right here. The number of times I've seen the 'whitey on the moon' nonsense is quite large. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=whitey%20on%20the%20moon&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... And probably most of those people don't realize they wouldn't be posting anything at all if not for 'whitey on the moon', the Apollo program era started with sliderules in 1962 and ended in 1972 with functional microcomputers (8008, 1972, shortly followed by the 6502, 1975) and a very short while later we had programmable pocket calculators (Ti59, 1977). The whole semi conductor industry was jumpstarted in those years. When I first started out with electronics transistors were an absolute rarity and tubes were normal, in the space of a decade that changed completely.
- myrmidon 3y ago
  > NASA bootstrapped the semiconductor industry by buying up most of the world's supply. Without the Apollo program we may only just now have gotten smartphones. I strongly disagree with that. The semiconductor industry was thriving before NASA even existed, none of the central enabling inventions (MOSFET transistors, semiconductor manufacturing techniques) were made there or even related to the Apollo program, and "computers" as in turing complete machines already existed before NASA and had plenty of applications apart from space travel. NASA/Apollo giving todays smartphones a 10 year technology boost is just pure fiction and not even remotely supported by facts.
  - knorker 3y ago
    We can't do an A/B with history, but I'm basing it on things like: > By the mid-1960s, according to the PBS documentary, NASA was buying 60 percent of the integrated circuits produced in the United States. Fairchild was a major supplier, shipping about 100,000 devices for the Apollo space program in 1964 alone.
  - peterfirefly 3y ago
    It's right up there with velcro and teflon.
unregistereddev 3y ago
Not only did the Cray weigh far more than the Apollo computer, and not only did the Cray supercomputer use far more power, but the Apollo computers had to be designed to be highly resistant to interference from radiation. Radiation hardened electronics are fascinating to me. To this day, electronics that function in outer space are much slower than datacenter or consumer-oriented components.

I guess it was THAT much faster. That is an insane leap in performance in a decade. I know they are apples and oranges. One weighed about 150x more than the other, but still such a surprise to me.

jacquesm 3y ago

Seymour Cray was absolute genius. There are so many innovations in the Cray-1 that you could easily write a book about it. edit: some searching later: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/116196 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/116196

knorker 3y ago

They're not just apples and oranges, but apples vs differential equations. They had completely different requirements. Like ROM being sown for Apollo. You get something completely different if failure is not an option. But also yes, it is a big leap. NASA bootstrapped the semiconductor industry by buying up most of the world's supply. Without the Apollo program we may only just now have gotten smartphones. (And some people still think it's a waste of money. pff!)

beerandt 3y ago
Yeah, primarily minimize weight and power while meeting compute requirements. Excess compute in this case is bad design. The cray was 10,000 lb and 115 kilowatts. Not payload friendly. I'm imagining Kevin Bacon doing his Apollo 13 power budgeting scene, but needs another ~114kw.
- knorker 3y ago
  Gary Sinise. Kevin Bacon had already had the measles, so he took his place. :-)
jacquesm 3y ago
> And some people still think it's a waste of money. Some of those people are right here. The number of times I've seen the 'whitey on the moon' nonsense is quite large. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=whitey%20on%20the%20moon&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... And probably most of those people don't realize they wouldn't be posting anything at all if not for 'whitey on the moon', the Apollo program era started with sliderules in 1962 and ended in 1972 with functional microcomputers (8008, 1972, shortly followed by the 6502, 1975) and a very short while later we had programmable pocket calculators (Ti59, 1977). The whole semi conductor industry was jumpstarted in those years. When I first started out with electronics transistors were an absolute rarity and tubes were normal, in the space of a decade that changed completely.
myrmidon 3y ago
> NASA bootstrapped the semiconductor industry by buying up most of the world's supply. Without the Apollo program we may only just now have gotten smartphones. I strongly disagree with that. The semiconductor industry was thriving before NASA even existed, none of the central enabling inventions (MOSFET transistors, semiconductor manufacturing techniques) were made there or even related to the Apollo program, and "computers" as in turing complete machines already existed before NASA and had plenty of applications apart from space travel. NASA/Apollo giving todays smartphones a 10 year technology boost is just pure fiction and not even remotely supported by facts.
- knorker 3y ago
  We can't do an A/B with history, but I'm basing it on things like: > By the mid-1960s, according to the PBS documentary, NASA was buying 60 percent of the integrated circuits produced in the United States. Fairchild was a major supplier, shipping about 100,000 devices for the Apollo space program in 1964 alone.
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  It's right up there with velcro and teflon.

unregistereddev 3y ago

Not only did the Cray weigh far more than the Apollo computer, and not only did the Cray supercomputer use far more power, but the Apollo computers had to be designed to be highly resistant to interference from radiation. Radiation hardened electronics are fascinating to me. To this day, electronics that function in outer space are much slower than datacenter or consumer-oriented components.