Re: OT: Apollo Landing Site Images

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:32:08 -0700 (PDT), Sjfdix wrote in post :
<news:6b88cbac-7549-49e5-a2e5-801ffbcec296@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> :

On Jul 29, 11:38 am, Mark <i...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:40:57 GMT, "Trevor Ridney"

<tridd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

Given the date, here's one in the eye for all the Doubting Thomases...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosite...

Can't get my head round the fact it was *forty* years ago!

It's amazing that they could achieve so much with the limited
techology (i.e. computers) that was available then.

It was a triumph of good engineering, something that is lacking
nowadays IMHO.

What had me totally gobsmacked is that the program for the Lander and
Command modules was literally woven into memory.

The binary code was apparently stored on ferric core Read-Only Memory,
which was hand-threaded by a huge group of women. Not the most
efficient way they could have stored it, but due to the possibility of
stellar radiation interfering with computer memory, the most secure.

And I thought I had it bad learning to program on punch-cards!

A nice bit from an interview with Neil Armstrong:...

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain
reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a
reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures
in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its
reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would
have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more
like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical
methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every
guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector,
every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so
on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going
to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make
it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job
a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance.
And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.



--
Tim C.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: death of the mind.
    ... >> vision of science is the sterile state of their explanatory theories. ... engages in the behavior said to "show memory." ... > computers aren't animals and probably aren't like them in very many ways. ... And I've published inferential statistics when forced to - which was most of ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: self-extracting diskette image to hard disk? (or, IBM keeping inexpensive supercomputers awa
    ... >> also have brought in huge amounts of money, ... > I know what IBM was doing, ... >> claiming not only that memory would be many times larger than existing ... >> selling these super computers for $3000. ...
    (comp.os.os2.misc)
  • Re: Breaking Large Composite Numbers...???
    ... with somewhere between 1 and 10 Tbytes of memory.. ... supercomputers that have more than your 10 TiB of memory. ... because those aren't computers, they are clusters. ... precision calculations on hundred thousands of cores. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: 386sx/25mhz compatibility
    ... I'd need to add hard drives also, ... a better computer out of the garbage. ... Pentium, mid-2001, suddenly better computers started appearing. ... later, I got a 50MHz 486 with 16megs of memory, for ten dollars. ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: Cracking DES with C++ is faster than Java?
    ... >> Computers can access fixed locations in memory ... One of the disadvantages of using absolute memory ... When the instruction is longer, either it will take more time ... >> be accessed using relative locations. ...
    (comp.lang.cpp)
Loading