The smartphone that you have in your pocket is more powerful than the computer that brought the man to the moon with the Apollo 11 mission of 1969. It may seem incredible as affirmation, but it is absolutely true: the hardware and software technologies of your phone are infinitely more advanced than those of theAGC (Apollo Guidance Computer), the beating heart of the space mission. The computer used by Neil Armstrong And Buzz Aldrin To complete the first wing of history, he had a memory Ram just 32,768 bit And 72 Kilobyte of reading memory, the so -called Romused to keep unchangeable programs. Compared, a modern phone has Gigabyte of RAM and ROMwith calculation powers that they exceed hundreds of thousands of times those of the AGC.
Smartphone and AGC of Apollo 11 on the Moon: the comparison
Let’s start by putting a comparison the AGC hardware with that of modern smartphones. The computer that guided Apollo 11 on the Moon, had a memory Ram (Random Access Memory) from 32,768 total bitsable to memorize 2048 words of 16 bit each. In computer science, a word is a set of bits, defined length, which is treated as a single unit from the processor and its instruction set. The size of this word represents a fundamental element in the architecture of a computer, directly influencing the amount of data that the system can process in a single step. Another punctualization: RAM is the temporary memory that computers use to work with current data; It is lost if the device turns off. The AGC also ordered 72 Kilobyte memory Rom (Read Only Memory), used to contain the “fixed” software, that is, the code that could not have changed during the mission.
Today a “medium-low” band smartphone has at least 4 Gigabyte of RAM That is 4 billion bytes, equivalent to over 34 billion bits. This quantity is more than a million times higher than that of the computer of the Apollo 11 mission. As regards permanent memory, some models can reach 512 gigabytes, i.e. more than 4 trillions of bits, or over 7 million times that of the AGC.
If we pass instead to the processing power, the apotal processor worked at an operational frequency of approx 0.043 Megahertz (or MHz), while a current smartphone processor usually has an operational frequency of at least 2000 MHz. This means that your phone, although it should be a medium-low range model, would be over one hundred thousand times faster in performing calculations compared to the computer used for the first wing. Amazing!
Not only are the memory and calculation speed different: modern computers have specialized chips that deal with specific tasks, such as the management of the display or the processing of images and sounds, further increasing their efficiency and ability to perform complex actions.
Another detail linked to the hardware that we cannot fail to pass under the lens concerns the Hardware weight: while the Apollo Guidance Computer, according to what was stated on this page of the NASA website, weighed the beauty of 29.5 kgsmartphones hardly exceed 200-250 grams of weight.
And what about the complexity of theuser interface computer? It was based on a system called Dsky (Keyboard display), which worked by inserting numeric codes through a very rudimentary keyboard, which recalls that of calculators. Second Graham KendallProfessor Emeritus of the University of NotThingam, if at the time of the Apollo 11 mission it was possible to have current technologies “almost certainly (the AGC, editor’s note) He wouldn’t have had a keyboard, but would have used scrolling controls on a touchscreen. If this had not been possible due to the need to wear gloves, the interaction would have been able to take place through gestures, eye movements or some other intuitive interfaces».
Not to mention, then, of the increasingly advanced functions, based on artificial intelligence, of which the modern operating systems of smartphones have: at the time of the apollo guidance computer, all this was pure science fiction.
Even the most powerful scientific calculators of the AGC computer
We conclude with a small curiosity: even before the advent of the powerful smartphones today, even simple scientific calculators of the 90s had passed the power of the AGC. Taking the Ti-73this calculator produced by Texas Instruments It was 8 times more ram and a calculation speed 140 times higher than that of the computer used in the Apollo 11 mission; the next model, the Ti-84even had 32 times more ram and a speed almost 350 times higher. This shows how important the giant steps made in the field in electronics have been in not even three decades.
