Computers in the Apollo program

[Tormod]

I am writing a Christmas quiz for the Norwegian Space Centre website and found a very interesting article about the computers used on the Apollo lunar missions.

 

http://www.avocetsystems.com/company/articles/eu/eu23.htm

 

It's hilarious to read about this stuff - imagine leaving your life in the "hands" of equipment like this!

[alexander]

I heard something about that, my calculator is more powerful than the on-board computer of an Apollo Rocket, its probably hundreds if not thousands of times faster and has hundreds of times the storage capacity... and yet a PDA runs faster than the fastest computer at the time that article was written, about 433 MHZ.

 

You know, I would never buy a 2003 BMW because they ran Windows on their on-board computer, they switched to Linux, i believe, after an incident with a prime minister of one of these random countries in Europe, they were going to anyways. I cant imagine flying to the moon on an undebugged, non error handling, untested software... I'd wanna go over their source, test it myself for a few weeks before i even begin thinkign about trusting it!