US Space Shuttle runs on 1MB of RAM and 80’s technology…still

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highwaystar101 said:

 (apparently about the same spec as a modern day laptop, although I find this claim dubious)

Why does that sound so dubious?

If the equipment was installed in '80 it's been 360 months or 20 iterations of 18 month increments.

By Moore's law computers should be around 1,048,576x faster today than they were then.  Obviously it's not exactly that simple, but it's a good enough ballpark figure, and large enough that a laptop today could easily rival (or surpass) a supercomputer then.

Luckily for modern society, reptitous doubling gets out of hand rather quickly =)

TheRealMafoo said:

As someone who has worked on Satellite hardware, I can give some insight on why this is true.

Electronic hardware needs to be Rad Hardened. This is a technique of shielding the boards and CPU's from radiation. A lot of the new stuff has just never been put through this process.

In Space, power is king. If a CPU can do every calculation you require from it, the one that takes the least amount of power is the best choice, regardless of age. The older Motorola CPU's fit this bill nicely.

I have been out of the government game for 6 years now, so not sure what they do today. But when I was working on a program just 6 years ago, with a 140 million dollar budget, we used 10 year old CPU's. Not because we didn't have any money or that government moved slow, but because out of all the CPU's on the market, they fit the requirement best.

 The only thing I disagree with here is on the subject of power.  You can reduce the power requirements of the electronics with modern components without actually changing the specs.  The reduction in size is typically accompanied by necessary amperage reductions and thus wattage reductions.