Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/05/explainer-video-about-the-digi.html
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Not to mention the computer was entirely hand made and used copper rope memory for a total of 4kb of RAM and 32kb hard disk.
now that’s some tight coding!
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An in-browser version of those old Lunar Lander games, because why not…
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To be clear there was no disk, but the 32k copper rope ROM served a similar role, storing programs. There is no way that a hard drive would have been reliable enough given the amount of shaking the spacecraft was subjected to.
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WOT! No light pen?
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I know, it’s difficult to compare, but still…
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I’d bet that the average smartphone is more powerful than the big mainframes that were used to calculate the mission parameters (what velocity is needed HERE to get THERE, and how long to fire the engines to achieve it)
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Nowadays? A lot of wristwatches - and I’m not even talking about ‘smart’ watches - have more compute power than one of those old mainframes. Heck, many doorknobs do. (The authenticator in hotel room doorknobs needs to do the crypto stuff.)
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Not for playing on your Android phone. 
On my previous go I made a 2 mile crater…
Time to boot up the laptop!!
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I managed to reach 36500 altitude on a straight up flight and hit the moon at over 1200 vertical speed. My astronauts died a quick and painless death. (I also made a couple safe landings, but that was somehow less fun. So much for a career with NASA. 
)
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Climbed at 960 under power, but hit at 1180 freefalling. Even 1/6th gravity is a bitch…
Good game 
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And then there also was the computer that flew the Saturn V itself:
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TIL that the 3rd stages of 5 Apollo missions were deliberately crashed into the moon!
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Comparing the USB chargers to the ground based Apollo mainframes is probably a much more reasonable comparison than the Apollo guidance computer.
The 4 computers on the Apollo 11 mission weren’t designed to operate like a common computer, they focused on real time extremely low latency calculations. A “spinning pinwheel of death” in the context of an Apollo mission computer could be just a little bit to literal. Although something similar did happen and almost forced an abort of the Apollo 11 landing.
That was the bit that went according to plan for Apollo 13…
There is a NASA documentary film about 13, about an hour long, and for some reason with a steel drum/calypso score. Lots of footage from mission control, and at one point you see the impact on the seismometer readouts and hear capcom tell the crew that the stage has crashed as planned on the Moon “and is rocking it a bit”.
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More relevantly, an in-browser simulation of the AGC:
https://svtsim.com/moonjs/agc.html
(link to the launch checklist at the top)
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When I worked at Nortel they had posters on the wall bragging about their IBM mainframe that was one of the world’s biggest… “It can do 30 million operations a second!”. That was a while ago, but I have scrapped computers that were dozens of times faster.
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That little boot ROM computer that Intel’s latest security foofaraw is over is a fucking 486. Shit has gotten tiny.
That’s not fair.
That 486SLC I had in 2000 to briefly try Linux, that wsn’t “too slow” at the time, but it didn’t have enough memory or hard drive, and that was a problem.
It was clocked at 50 or 60 MHz.
I wouldn’t go back now.
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