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.
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 The qualification can take so long that the darn thing is obsolete by then!I remember them discussing their use of "antiquated" computers when I toured the Johnson Space Center.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.
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
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.
Steve Williams Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator | Ron Resnick Site Co-Owner | Administrator | Julian (The Fixer) Website Build | Marketing Managersing |