Did we really send people to the moon with less electronics than my teenagers routinely takes into the bathroom with them?
by 
Beavis - the other white meat
ANSWERS: 7
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Ummm...yeah, pretty much. lol
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We gave them a treadmeal didn't we, thats high tech. lol
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apparently !!
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The Apollo missions were built around DEC PDP-11 series minicomputers. The on-board computers worked in conjunction with ground-based mainframes. A single modern laptop could replace all of the spacecraft computers and handle much of the mainframe's load at the same time if it was programmed in "assembly language" - a very tedious but very efficient way to write programs. Modern operating systems, particularly Windows, are much easier to program in but are very demanding on memory and CPU time. A PDP-11 could not run Windows because of its limited instruction set and small RAM capacity.
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Lol...Yes, thats what the picture tube has informed me.
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to run on the Apollo Guidance Computer, a device with less grunt than an IBM XT — it had 2K of memory and a 1-MHz clock speed. It was an amazing machine for its time. NASA engineers tested, polished, simulated, and refined the code. "The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were 'assembled' to instruction binary on mainframes... and it took hours. ... During the mission, most of the software code couldn't be changed because it was hard-coded into the hardware, like ROM today... But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by... computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs. The software used a low-level assembly language and was controlled using pairs or segments of numbers entered into a square-shaped, numeric-only keyboard called a Display and Keyboard Unit... The two-digit codes stood for 'nouns' or 'verbs,' and were used to enter commands or data, such as spacecraft docking angles or time spans for operations."
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Watch out; he may be building his own Apollo down in the basement! . BTW; off topic, where the h*ll have you been? I haven't seen you here in quite some time. It might be that I haven't been here regularly either; but I hope everything is going okay...and I'm glad to see you again.
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