How much computing power did NASA have when they put a man on the moon?

A Baby Ate My Dingo: How much computing power did NASA have when they put a man on the moon?
I’ve heard that there is more computing power in the average $ 600 laptop than all of NASA had when they put a man on the moon.

Is that true?

Answers and Views:

Answer by Stimpy
That is probably true.

Yes, we once lived without computers.

Answer by cosmo
Yes, it’s true. At the time, a large main-frame computer had a clock speed of a few Megahertz, and perhaps as much as 512 K of magnetic-ring memory. Inputs were on paper tape or punched cards. A disk drive the size of a dishwasher had 10 Meg of storage.

Answer by chrissy
Thinking about that…wow, must’ve been a miracle that put that man on the moon.

Answer by joesixpack
Very likely true, but when you consider that NASA also had many of the brightest scientists, engineers, and technicians working there, it’s not very different than today. It’s the people who use those computers that make the difference.

And just to add a bit to stimpy’s answer, we once did everything without computers. Jet Aircraft were invented, oceans were crossed, rockets were built, and nuclear reactors (and bombs, too) were designed

Answer by meanolmaw
just enough!!!…

yep…. but they checked what the computers spit out with folks using slide rules that could actually DO math without a calculator!!…..

Answer by ericbryce2
They had plenty of computing power but the difference was it filled entire rooms. Neil Armstrong was quoted as saying two things made the Lunar landings possible, the “liquid fuel rocket and the digital computer”. The Staturn V had over a million moving parts. Computers on the ground and the I.U. (instrument unit) monitored every aspect of the boost phase and the rest of the lunar missions which would not have been possible withour them.
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Answer by Blue Sky
Not that much power –

The computer they had was about as powerful as the calculator you can buy shrinkwrapped in the check-out line at Walgreens. It could add, subtract, multiply and divide, square root, a few memory holds. Plus it was about 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet big and weighed a few hundred pounds.

Answer by you and me
yes it is true

Answer by jackrabbtjump
and to think the price of those computers were in the range of $ 300,000.00 and a computer from wal-mart could do several million more bits of info per second now!

Answer by laurahal42
Yes.

This is hardly surprising, when you consider the enormous development in computers that has occurred since then.

All the systems NASA used are extensively documented. I have a LM computer simulator on the computer I’m typing this on.

Answer by Jason T
Yes, it’s true. But bear in mind what computing power is actually used for in the two different systems. The Apollo computers were dedicated systems with a single function: navigation of the Apollo spacecraft. A laptop uses a heck of a lot of its computing power generating fancy visuals on a screen, running multiple programs in the background, being able to open several widows at once, and so on. None of that applies to the spacecraft computer.

Answer by Dave_Stark
On the spacecraft themselves, very little — probably less computing capability than your average pocket calculator of today. In the late 1960s, transitors were new, and incredibly large compared to what you find today, and magnetic memory was — quite literally — little ring-shaped magnets on wires! In fact, the microchip, which enables our pocket calculators, cell phones, PDAs, and home PCs, wasn’t even patented until 1971!

But they did have computers back in the ’60s — they just occupied entire buildings. And they also had lots of very smart people with sliderules, and pencil and paper, doing their math very rapidly. And the small computers they had on the spacecraft of the time did very limited tasks, and humans had to do the rest.

We have become so totally reliant on computers in these modern times, that it is hard, espceially for youngsters, to realize that there was a time before the PC, when you actually had to do arithmetic on paper for even “grown-up” jobs!!

Answer by Ultraviolet Oasis
Actually, someone just sent a Nintendo 8-bit game console into the past.

No, seriously man. I do not know, but it would be interesting to know the real answer.