Sqrl said:
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 =) |
You misunderstood my post...
Don't worry, I understand Moore's law. But I wasn't talking about the 1980's, I was talking about the 1960's Apollo mission. Yes a super computer in the 1980's would rival or even surpass a modern laptop; but in the 1960's, computing was a completely different game.
When the Apollo mission was launched in the late 1960's, the highest spec. computer in the world was the CPC7600, which could deliver 36MFlops, which is not a lot when you consider our modern laptops work with Gflops.
So either NASA had some secret super computer that massively outperformed the most powerful super computer of the day, or, as I think, the story has been romanticised by documentaries.
