Posted on 05/30/2015 11:28:13 AM PDT by QT3.14
[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
“The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems”
Considering that all computers in the world combined cannot mimic the brain of a house fly and Apollo mission had thousands of human brains working at the same time, no amount of computational power in the next 2 trillion years is going to match that power that the Apollo mission had.
BFL
Porn will be even more realistic.
Why do we keep aborting those smart people?
/johnny
no offense after 35 years working in computers this is an idiotic comparison I worked on a lot of those old systems they were optimized for what they did...
The majority of the power used in the newer computers is used in display graphics, and grotesquely bloated operating systems and applications that are convoluted kludgy mashups of other other convoluted kludgy mashups
You rarely see the elegance of tight simple code for a given task anymore ...
programmers, do the abundance of system resources, have become lazy wasteful gluttons of system resources
There's an old anecdote about Seymour Cray -- someone at Cray called him in his office, told him that Apple had bought the "leftover" Cray to design the next Apple, and after a pause he said, that's interesting, because I'm using an Apple to design the next Cray.
I remember that game. everyone was so in awe!
As a side note, I had read where the electronics systems in early NASA rockets used vacuum tubes, corrections welcome. This was noted because blastoff acceleration was claimed to pull the tubes out of their sockets enough to break connections.
Society continues to underestimate the pace of tech progress. A few years ago a group of scientists said that a Star Trek-like Transporter would be impossible, because the memory requirements would require a stack of disk drives 120,000 miles high. I disagree. At the pace of technology, it is easy to envision a small memory device the size of one of today’s PCs with that much computing power.
Tubes would have sucked too much power. They used primitive ( by our standards) IC’s.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational on 12 January 1992, at the H.A.L. Laboratories in Urbana, Illinois
As I have said before, when you drag a window across your screen, you are using far more computer power than the IBM-370 that my father programmed (back when I was in high school) had. And he supported his family, gave us a nice house to live in, and put two kids through college on his salary.
lol. that’s the new and improved version.
Wrong. It will be even more unrealistic.
An app on my iPhone can take me to the moon. All I need is a space-craft.
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