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.

Sounds like it could be a case of the difference between coding efficiency then VS now.  As HappySqrl pointed out earlier the calculations on what has more $$ value has changed substantially since the 60's.  It used to be that the computer time was far and away worth more than the programmers time because the computers were ungodly expensive and the programmers usually worked for free or very little (depending on whether it was a business or university machine).  Now a programmer makes a tidy salary and the computer could be purchased out of the petty cash of most businesses.  Coding practices and what is and isn't acceptable efficiency change a lot to suit the standards of the day.

Then on top of pure incentive to have coding efficiency they had the advantage of being able to program for a specific architecture which gave them another advantage (not to mention not having to run some Albatross of an OS).

There is no way to determine how much any of those factors makes a difference, or if together they could make up the entire difference you're talking about, but I think they could go a long ways towards closing the gap.

I'm aware of what HappySquirrel said, coding efficiency back then was greater for obvious reasons. I accept that as fact.

But the functions of computers throughout history have often been similar regardless of power. I still have my first laptop from 1995, and whilst my current laptop massively outperforms it, the basic functions are still pretty similar. My old laptop runs an old version of MS word as well as my new laptop runs Word 2007.

Does this make my old laptop from 1995 as powerful as my new laptop? Not by a long shot.

What is different is that technically my new laptop is a lot more powerful than my old one. Coding efficiency does not enter into the equation when deciding which one of my laptops is more powerful, despite similar performance when running the relative programs.

I'm afraid that no matter how efficient the SPC7600 was, it is still not as powerful as a modern laptop.

*I'm hungover as fuck*