Computing Power

[oscars]

A comparison between the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and say an iPhone 6 is tricky because the AGC was not a general purpose computer. It was built for a very specific task, had a unique operating system and with the 48-year gap in the technologies used, we can only really get very rough estimates.The Apple iPhone 6 uses the ARM A8 processor which has about 1.6 billion transistors in it, the AGC had just 12,300. The iPhone 6 has 1Gb of RAM, about 488,000 times the AGC and in this one, 128Gb of non-volatile storage or about 3.5 million times the AGC.

As for performance, the iPhone 6 is somewhere between maybe 4 and 30 Million times faster than the AGC depending on what type of calculations are being done and if you include the iPhone?s GPU it would be even more.So, if you had to fly back to the moon in an Apollo craft and given the choice, would you trust your life to a couple of iPhones in place of the AGC?s?, because you would actually have more computing power in just one of them than the whole of NASA had during all the Apollo missions.

[lyman]

when I was in Grade school, my parents bought a Canon pocket calculator,
I still have it,

it was 'a big deal' and pretty darn neat, even as simple as it was,

the computers we had when I was a Senior in high school were extremely simple DOS machines,

[Allen]

A friend of mine in college (1971) bought a Texas Instruments calculator (TI-10). The price was $100, a hefty sum back then. The calculator was considered state of the art at the time but only did the basic 4 functions (+ - * /).

[dryheat]

Because I was just reading about the Voyager mission yesterday it mentioned that todays I phone is X millions of times better than what is onboard the spacecraft. But 45 year later some of the equipment on board is still sending messages back to headquarters from a few billion miles away. Took some good pictures to. Of course the pics were all 1's and 0's but post processing converted that to some nice shots.
Technology changes. People stay the same.

[Phloating Phlasher]

I remember reading a pair of Sci Fi novels back in the late 60's.
A big part of the plot was getting a design & specs for a "Super Computer, generations beyond anything humans could design or build." from an alien civilization "out beyond Andromeda, in M32"
The phrase I remember was "The memory cores were so big the control room was inside the memory core, unlike most computers"!

Years went by & now its the mid 80's, I re-read the book & where they give "specifications" for this alien designed super computer My TS 2068 with the 4-slot expander bus & 3X512K memory banks, which had to be bank switched so the 8 bit CPU could address all the memory addresses available & an OS upgrade in slot 4, plus the (IIIRC 20 Meg) HDD with a custom SCSI interface, had a higher spec than that alien super computer!
Heck, it actually had a real monitor instead of a color TV, so the old color TV, from the C-64 it replaced, was a second monitor! It came in amazingly handy for seeing a highly (for the time) graphics rich simulation for training people on a big processing machine. You could run the CP/M debugger on one while seeing the output on the other!

Now I have something 5 or 6 generations from that that, a 64 bit running a GUI in Win 10, & its an antique! I'm using it mostly to surf the net, while the one 3 generations ahead of THAT is my phone!

[Mark in Ottawa]

When I started university, studying to be a civil engineer, nobody had even conceived of a tiny portable calculator that would fit in your shirt pocket. We understood that we would need a slide rule and on the assumption that I would be using it for about 40 years, I blew my very small budget and bought the best one on the market. A year after I graduated one of my colleagues came to work with the first 4 function, shirt pocket calculator that any of us had ever seen. A few years later, my wife, who taught computing at high school, took my slide rule to school, along with an abacus and Pascals beads to show her students what obsolete calculators looked like

[Johnny P]

Don't remember what year it was but I think around 1975, but our engineering group got HP 15's (I think that was the number) which were very advanced for the time. Still have a HP12C that I keep handy.

[barretcreek]

Slide rule is something today's math students should be taught. Still use my HP-11c and haven't outgrown it or mastered it's full capabilities.

My understanding one reason F-22 production ended is it's based on a 286 processor or earlier. Would have to redesign the entire avionics.

[lyman]

when I hit high school and college, you had to have a Texas Instrument TI30,

it served me well, (of sorts, I hate math) but eventually died,

that Canon is still going,


I remember in College i had to type a few papers, and went out and bought a Brother ( I think that was the brand) electric Typewriter with a word processor of some kind in it,
basically a LCD screen that showed me what I was typing before it typed it,
and while I can type fast now, then I was mostly hunt and peck, and my punctuation etc was as bad as I have now, if not worse,,,,,


and it broke in my Jr year

[Allen]

Texas Instrument TI-30. I think that was my first calculator. The first one that could do pi, sine, cosine, and a bunch of other BS that I knew I would never need or use.

[dryheat]

When I was in school for some reason I took a class in ten key adding machine. That was the most miserable thing I ever did. You could never pay me enough to do that all day. That was a long time ago and now you cannot give them away.

[BuckeyeShooter]

A friend of mine in college (1971) bought a Texas Instruments calculator (TI-10). The price was $100, a hefty sum back then. The calculator was considered state of the art at the time but only did the basic 4 functions (+ - * /).

Back in 1971-2 I bought one of those TI scientific calculators for $150. I was taking a corespondence course. Lke you said, they were expensive.
Every time I got the monthly bill, the balance matched the new lower price.

[gpb]

Was the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) a specific purpose-built analog computer or a programed digital computer?

[Phloating Phlasher]

It was the first actual electronic computing device.

[Vern Humphrey]

When I started university, studying to be a civil engineer, nobody had even conceived of a tiny portable calculator that would fit in your shirt pocket. We understood that we would need a slide rule and on the assumption that I would be using it for about 40 years, I blew my very small budget and bought the best one on the market. A year after I graduated one of my colleagues came to work with the first 4 function, shirt pocket calculator that any of us had ever seen. A few years later, my wife, who taught computing at high school, took my slide rule to school, along with an abacus and Pascals beads to show her students what obsolete calculators looked like

I still have my old Post slide rule from college.