Space Age (well, 1960s era) High Tech

[damont]

In 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."

Comments

[page-of-swords.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the memory thing when I saw a machine on sale with 8gig. Just to play games, image the data set :)

[loosecanon.livejournal.com]

I heard an interview with Col. Aldrin in which a similar comment was made.
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.

[luscious-purple.livejournal.com]

When Boston had a standalone Computer Museum, the museum had a section of "core memory" from one of the LMs. It was a 2D grid of copper wires, horizontal, vertical and diagonal, with little doughnut-shaped magnets at the junctions. *boggle*

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

Really Big Computers? Puh-LEEZ. My iPod has about a million times 128K in disk storage space, and you could probably build a laptop with that much just in RAM. (You might even be able to buy one off the shelf. 128GB just isn't that big any more.) Add another three zeros on the end if you want to play with the big boys.

Considering that pretty much any phone with a camera in it is capable of processing files larger than 128K without disturbing the phone functionality, I expect you're wrong about NASA 60s-era programming overwhelming one.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I'm not referring to disk storage, which is *always* larger than RAM size except in certain highly specialized applications.

Yes you can get to 128 GB of RAM but I'm not sure you could do it on a laptop. This blog post from a year ago (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/08/04/128gb-or-ram-finally-got-cheap/) notes a Dell server that has 32 memory slots for 4GB memory cards. It goes on to note that said server was going to run about 15 grand street price.

I haven't been able to find any references online for computers with 128 terabytes of RAM. (Disk, yeah, that's stupid easy these days.)

The kid's cell phone (which he pulled out when his mom referred to it) didn't look like it had a camera; looked more like mine, i.e. a low-end candy bar. She was probably not too far off on the kidphone's RAM size.

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

I went searching for supercomputer rankings and found this in the #2 spot on a 'Top 50' list. Note that it asserts over 360TB of memory (not storage) between the two partitions, with the vast majority in the larger one.

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

The point dr_zrfq was making was that computers at the time were single-function, not that the cell-phone couldn't handle it.

ISTR that on the DVD of "Apollo 13", one of the astronauts said that the computer power built into an Apollo spacecraft, is now running your coffeepot.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I should elaborate a bit: *those* computers, and most computers of their day, were single function. Boxes like the IBM System/360 and the GE MULTICS machines did exist, but they tended to dilute computing power. (Which was, in many ways, a design goal: parallelism has its advantages. Just not for the sort of crunching the space program needed at the time.)

Most of the computer power for an Apollo mission wasn't built into the spacecraft itself; what the spacecraft had then is definitely in the "coffeemaker" range of the scale today.

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

Heh. My first computer class was FORTRAN IV in 10th grade, 1971-72. We wrote the progs on coding sheets, then the teacher shipped 'em off to IBM for keypunching and running.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I've edited the post to reflect the new info.

The Univac and CDC models on display weren't way-top-end machines of their day, but neither were they low-end.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Your school paid someone at IBM to punch up the cards? Wow.

Though I suppose that was cheaper than buying a keypunch and everyone having to take turns using it, complete with keypunch errors (meaning you had to do the ENTIRE CARD ALL OVER AGAIN).