Putting Things in Perspective!

MylesBAstor

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Apr 20, 2010
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524163_10151000098758360_974696853_n.jpg
 

JackD201

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The world is hooked on streaming video!
 

amirm

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He is giving them way too much credit still! The computers of that era were a fraction of the speed of today's phones. Probably 100 to 1000X slower! My computer in 1978, which was way past that date ran at just 5 Mhz. Today's smartphones are singe and dual core 1000+ Mhz!

In 1989, I worked for a company that sold large minicomputers to Nasa. I went there to finish a project. I was shocked to see an entire line of our computers that were obsoleted 10 years back still powering everything! They were easily two generations behind commercial products.
 

MylesBAstor

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Apr 20, 2010
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He is giving them way too much credit still! The computers of that era were a fraction of the speed of today's phones. Probably 100 to 1000X slower! My computer in 1978, which was way past that date ran at just 5 Mhz. Today's smartphones are singe and dual core 1000+ Mhz!

In 1989, I worked for a company that sold large minicomputers to Nasa. I went there to finish a project. I was shocked to see an entire line of our computers that were obsoleted 10 years back still powering everything! They were easily two generations behind commercial products.

I remember them discussing their use of "antiquated" computers when I toured the Johnson Space Center. Had a lot to do with reliability and also compatability of platforms back then. So even though antiquated, they knew what the computers would do.
 

Gregadd

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When I was in college the discs looked like huge pie plates. They would click when the located the data.
 

amirm

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I remember them discussing their use of "antiquated" computers when I toured the Johnson Space Center. Had a lot to do with reliability and also compatability of platforms back then. So even though antiquated, they knew what the computers would do.
That and the fact that they are "life rated" as they are in your medical field. The qualification can take so long that the darn thing is obsolete by then! :)
 

MylesBAstor

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Apr 20, 2010
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i had to explain to my wife the significance of the flag being flown on the moon even though she knows way more about history than me. a lot of the stuff used on that mission was normal avionics guidance equipment. Some of the radios used at nasa at the time were vacuum tube types, but that does not mean they did not work just fine! I recognized them when i toured the museam at cape canaveral.

the first "computer" i ever worked on used a roll of film with dark and clear spaces that was "read" by photocells (the film blocked or passed the light) and that was the "memory' and the film was wound around a drum that rotated at a few rpm, so dont know how "fast" that memory was.....suppose 0.3hertz!


Tom

Yeah but it doesn't matter since we never really landed on the moon. Don't you know it was all just shot in Hollywood? ;)
 

cjfrbw

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I think they were shot in area 51 and some special hangars. In retrospect, many of the videos and pictures do look pretty fake by modern standards. Where are the stars? That would have been a dead giveaway by comparing star charts, so they just state that they are too dim to see.

The "chatty Cathy" repartee of the astronauts does not jive with being in an extraordinarily dangerous, cramped environment, bombarded with radiation, and the potential for momentary death from solar flares.

Many of the monitoring tapes from the NASA shots are still archived, but they "can't be played", because no equipment to play them anymore. One wonders.
 

MylesBAstor

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Apr 20, 2010
11,236
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I think they were shot in area 51 and some special hangars. In retrospect, many of the videos and pictures do look pretty fake by modern standards. Where are the stars? That would have been a dead giveaway by comparing star charts, so they just state that they are too dim to see.

The "chatty Cathy" repartee of the astronauts does not jive with being in an extraordinarily dangerous, cramped environment, bombarded with radiation, and the potential for momentary death from solar flares.

Many of the monitoring tapes from the NASA shots are still archived, but they "can't be played", because no equipment to play them anymore. One wonders.

I don't think the cameras and transmission gear were particularly high rez so how do you know it wasn't captured? Used to have that happen all the time videoing sports in HS.
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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Hi

Being in the IT field I must say that the tendency is to throw processing power at problems rather than trying to finesse it around.. You have too much data? Buy a larger storage ..
Example I was working with a Medium-sized Business that was thinking about acquiring a larger NAS .. The truth was they were trying to store almost everything that was produced from the PCs in the business: Personal pictures , load of mp3, videos, stuff downloaded from the Internet, all e-mails, etc and almost everything their employees ever "worked" on .. We worked with a Business Intelligence Analyst to properly size their Storage needs. The results: They needed about 10% of what they thought they would... IN layman term 1 TB was all they needed they were about to acquire a large Storage Area Network , not a NAS by the way, with capacity upward of 100 TB!!
Software are written with the same heavy handed approach. if it works slow; Increase the processing power. Programs are not properly written and applications are not tuned to OS or hardware. If the programs doesn't work with remote sites becasue it is bandwidth ineficient just increase the pipes ... Not saying that modern PCs are not better just saying hat a lot can be accoplished with lesser machine but better software and procedures and that is what NASA did ...
By the way in't it time that Air Traffic systems used the new codecs to make speech intelligible? The software and hardware are there and theyhave proved their reliability .. What gives ??/
 

stehno

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Jul 5, 2014
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