“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.
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
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.
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.
An app on my iPhone can take me to the moon. All I need is a space-craft.
About 1988 I had to install a 20 Mb hard drive in a desktop computer. The drive box was about 8”x 6” x 4” and weighed at least 5 lbs.
A couple of days ago I was looking as some microSD cards online for a new android tablet. The carrier for the 32 gb card was about 7/8” x 1-1/3” and the actual memory card was less than 5/8” x 1/2”.
From someone that started with the Univac 1050-II,
with the huge, then, teletype-tickertape remotes; thru
octal and hexadecimal displayed test equipment,
Hewlett Packard HP-1b test consoles with steel
removable hard disk packs, to today’s wowee laptops;
I can vouch for the quickening of Moore’s Law.
Not only did that land with that computer - they took off from the moon without a support structure....
Not only did they land with that computer - they took off from the moon without a support structure....
An IBM RAMAC 305 5 mb hard disk being loaded into an airplane in 1956.