Yet another popular TV science programme here has made the oft -repeated claim that the "computer power", whatever that means, which was available and used in the first Apollo moon landing was less than that of the modern mobile phone.In what ways and to what degree is this true?

An equally interesting, and less controversial fact, which the programme also gave was that fifty years has proved a short time in science and technology. The time between Alcock and Brown making the first non-stop transatlantic flight (June 1919) and the first moon landing (July 1969) was 50 years

If you'll indulge me in using Wikipedia as a reference, what I found is that the original Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) had hardware comprising approximately 5600 "gates" (each gate equivalent to a handful of transistors, compared to a modern CPU chip containing millions of transistors; was clocked at a little over 2 megahertz, compared to several gigahertz for today's CPUs; had less than 64K bytes total memory (ROM plus RAM), compared to on the order of a gigabyte of RAM today; used a calculator-style pushbutton pad for input, with output for the astronauts via an array of 7-segment numerals; and had no disk drives. The hardware was connected using wire wrap (no soldered printed circuit board) and then cast in epoxy.

Software was equally primitive by today's standards.

As for cell phones, I don't know the exact hardware specifications but I'm sure it's closer to your desktop PC than to that AGC!

quote:

Originally posted by Professor:

As for cell phones, I don't know the exact hardware specifications but I'm sure it's closer to your desktop PC than to that AGC!

And what's more you couldn't take photos, get instant video highlights of current soccer games or send texts on the AGC, so it was almost useless