Space Age (well, 1960s era) High Tech
Jul. 20th, 2009 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damontIn my previous post (go look, shameless plug) I talked just a little about how the moon landing was, in part, an achievement of technology. This story is related to that.
A few months ago we visited the Udvar-Hazy Center (Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Annex) recently. In the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar (a/k/a the Rockets and Space Flight Wing) they have some computers, two of which date back to the 1960s: a Univac 1232 and a CDC 3800. Each of these has the equivalent of about 128K of memory.
You heard me right: one hundred and twenty-eight kilobytes. Forty-odd years later, the Really Big Computers probably have a million times that. EDIT: In fact, standard mainframes may well have 2**20 times that, and for top-end modern supercomputers bump that 20 exponent up, perhaps as high as 30.
I was looking at these with a mother and her young kid, probably about 10 years old. Mom and kid are discussing the capacities of those old machines, and mom makes the accurate observation that the kid's cell phone has as much memory as either the Univac or the CDC box. The kid asks, "You mean I could use my cell phone to, like, get a rocket to the moon, or put a satellite in orbit?"
To this I responded: "Yes, if you put the right programs on it. You probably couldn't use it as a cell phone, 'cause the way those big boxes worked, you pretty much ran one big program at a time. So for the cell phone you'd have to clear the phone's memory and load the 'satellite launcher' program, If you wanted to use it as a cell phone again you'd clear the memory and reload the 'cell phone' program. Also, programs and operating systems in those days were designed to use the computer's limited memory as efficiently as possible because memory was EX-PEN-SIVE. Nowadays memory is cheap, but those NASA guys from the 1960s did some pretty amazing things with what they had."
A few months ago we visited the Udvar-Hazy Center (Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Annex) recently. In the James S. McDonnell Space Hangar (a/k/a the Rockets and Space Flight Wing) they have some computers, two of which date back to the 1960s: a Univac 1232 and a CDC 3800. Each of these has the equivalent of about 128K of memory.
You heard me right: one hundred and twenty-eight kilobytes. Forty-odd years later, the Really Big Computers probably have a million times that. EDIT: In fact, standard mainframes may well have 2**20 times that, and for top-end modern supercomputers bump that 20 exponent up, perhaps as high as 30.
I was looking at these with a mother and her young kid, probably about 10 years old. Mom and kid are discussing the capacities of those old machines, and mom makes the accurate observation that the kid's cell phone has as much memory as either the Univac or the CDC box. The kid asks, "You mean I could use my cell phone to, like, get a rocket to the moon, or put a satellite in orbit?"
To this I responded: "Yes, if you put the right programs on it. You probably couldn't use it as a cell phone, 'cause the way those big boxes worked, you pretty much ran one big program at a time. So for the cell phone you'd have to clear the phone's memory and load the 'satellite launcher' program, If you wanted to use it as a cell phone again you'd clear the memory and reload the 'cell phone' program. Also, programs and operating systems in those days were designed to use the computer's limited memory as efficiently as possible because memory was EX-PEN-SIVE. Nowadays memory is cheap, but those NASA guys from the 1960s did some pretty amazing things with what they had."
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Date: 2009-07-20 10:58 pm (UTC)He took umbrage at the thought of a cellphone being able to work as a Moon Lander, but I think he may have missed the question.
He was trying to state what you just did, that they did so much with so little.