That thing to the right is a USB-C charger, a totally mundane device that we tend to take for granted. You’ve probably got one, or something similar. I have a similar device by a different company, it’s a boring utilitarian widget you need to keep a device powered up.
It contains a 48mHz CPU, 8K RAM, and 128K of flash memory. I’m torn between sneering at those pathetic stats and being impressed that a mere charger has that much computing power — my first home computer had a 1mHz CPU and 16K RAM, and heck, now mere cables contain complex circuitry.
But now compare that USB charger to the Apollo 11 guidance computer.
Compared with the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer it runs at ~48 times the clock speed with 1.8x the program space.
They compared several USB chargers to the Apollo guidance computer.
I guess once I dismantle this here stupid $30 wall charger, all I need to do is assemble a few million kilograms of simple stuff like rocket engines and fuel and a life support system, and I’ll be taking off for the moon. See you all later!
“In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.”
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/12/31/0017205/how-a-cray-1-supercomputer-compares-to-a-raspberry-pi
I’ve got a Raspberry Pi in the lab — I’m impressed with all the stuff it can do for so cheap.
Iron Sky is a 2012 comic-science-fiction action film directed by Timo Vuorensola and written by Johanna Sinisalo and Michael Kalesniko. It tells the story of a group of Nazi Germans who, having been defeated in 1945, fled to the Moon, where they built a space fleet to return in 2018 and conquer Earth.
…
Upon landing on the far side of the Moon, they encounter the descendants of Nazis who escaped to the Moon in 1945 (self-styled the “Fourth Reich” in dialogue). Washington is taken captive after the other astronaut is killed. Nazi scientist Doktor Richter examines Washington and obtains his smartphone, which he later recognizes as having more computing power than the 1940s-style computers of the Fourth Reich, enabling its use as a control unit to complete their giant space battleship Götterdämmerung.
My last job, I did software for a company doing architectural scale art installations, usually with a digital component. In practice, this meant building big sculptural objects, hallways, ceilings, etc. studded with LEDs and controlled by a variety of small computers- frequently Raspberry Pi-type things. I started ranking our installations in “Moon Missions” (the number of Apollo computers, roughly, that our specs equalled), mostly as a joke. I mean, the amount of cheap computing we were throwing into buildings to make a handful of lights blink pretty was bonkers. It may have kilo or mega-Apollos on some installs, I don’t recall for sure.
The punchline is when I changed jobs- I moved to a private company making moon landers for NASA. So now I am actually launching computers into space.
The advances in computing are impressive. The first desktop PC I assembled in 2000 cost me a year’s wages in CZ and I only could afford it because I had an opportunity to work in the USA, where I got that money in two months. The cheapest smartphones today outstrip that PC by orders of magnitude in every aspect, while costing about a tenth of average monthly wage in CZ.
I only wish that societal progress matched the technical one.
I have said for many years that Captain Kirk would do scandalous things with a Gorn to get his hands on your obsolete iPhone.
@5 Charly wrote: I only wish that societal progress matched the technical one.
I reply: You are Soooo correct. We are technological teenagers, but societal 5 year olds hitting each other with our toys.
And, Yes, you don’t have to have the most expensive new computing power. I’m posting this comment from my 2003 Dell dimension 2400 with no harddrive running puppy linux on a 16 GB usb flash drive.
Now, I’m going to shut up and go back to my work on the EHRLICHTOR project.
I read a while ago that the first CPU used in a home PC is now used in some disposable pregnancy test kits. In fact, one programmer was able to get DOOM to play on one of them. https://www.pcmag.com/news/yes-doom-is-playable-on-a-pregnancy-test
I bet you and your phone charger will get to the moon before Elon does.
The old Soviet Union used to use microchips from US toys and video games to run their military hardware.
There was some discussion in the US about limiting toy sales to the USSR. Or not using military grade chips in children’s toys.
The Russians have upgraded their manufacturing lately.
They are now using chips from US home appliances such as washing machines and microwave ovens in their military hardware.
@HidariMak #8
I’m continuously amazed at the things people can get Doom to run on considering I had to buy a new computer to get the original version to work.
@raven #10
“Military Grade” is in the eye of the beholder. Russia has historically been more of a “Quantity over Quality” sort of military power.
The Apollo Guidance Computer had one big advantage over most of those listed above. It was unhackable: to preserve the integrity of its read-only memory against the unknown effects of cosmic rays etc. the memory was hand-woven, all 72 kilobytes of it. To flip a bit, you’d have to unweave the relevant wire and physically rethread it .
One reason you get circuitry in USB cables is that Apple is trying to cram more and more stuff in an iPhone, so much stuff that things have started dribbling out the ports and ending up in the cable ends. Also, you need a bit of circuitry even in the old chargers so it can recognize if it’s connected to a device that can handle rapid charging.
Crays were interesting because they could do matrix operations insanely quickly. It would IIRC take longer to load the matrix into the registers than to do an inversion. Of course, nowadays, you can find the same stuff on a graphics card.
Many years ago when I worked for that technologically backward institution called guvmint it was glacially slow on the uptake of computers meaning that the research scientists had to buy their own. This meant when the department eventually bit the bullet and rolled out computers it had to deal with a hodge-podge of operating systems database and statistics and other software all of which were a nightmare for the fledgling IT section. Back then I was a lowly part time masters student and I didn’t qualify for a computer except for access to a useless dumb terminal connected by a dodgy phone line to a mainframe in another building 200 minutes walk away. I had to buy my own desktop and statistics software to handle the work I was doing for the masters. I had to sell my car and revert to public transport to pay for it. spreadsheet I has was so large than when I used the stats software the program had to run overnight to get a result. Eventually when they decided that desktops were essential for all the underlings and I persuaded the research scientists that we needed decent stats software I ran my spreadsheet through it on my nice shiny new desktop and out came the answer almost as fast as I could blink.
Software was another issue. An Australian distributor had purchased the licenses for virtually all the decent stats packages. The one we wanted cost over $1800. I got my copy for $300 sent across by a colleague in the US. Highly illegal but customs were more interested in other contraband to bother checking.
garydargan@14–
I recall the era of excessively priced stats packages and what I had to pay for Stata. Well, they cooked their own goose didn’t they?, because now it’s free and only fractionally more difficult to code your own data analysis in Python or R…in fact, nowadays every major language has an excellent stats module.
[ack! sorry, didn’t know]
@Le Chifforobe #9:
And with any luck your phone charger will at least return to Earth, unlike… No, never mind. Forget I said that.
@6 Capt Kirk would do scandalous things with any female Gorn. He’d be insulted by your implication that he needed an external incentive.
Chekhov would sneer at that obsolete iPhone, claiming that his aunt in Leningrad had better (no doubt due to her skill at washing-machine disassembly).
Ah, memories. In my first real job, I was asked to work miracles in embedded programming with assembler all the time. While figuring out how to do it from the spec sheet. It was so much fun!
Does this mean that the skills I have with punch cards may not be current or useful anymore.
48 mHZ is pretty slow. Even good ol’ ENIAC could operate around 500 Hz, about 10,000 times faster.
;)
raven: by “US home appliances” you really mean Ukrainian ones, manufactured by German companies in Turkey or China with electronics from Taiwan and wiring harnesses from, among others, Ukraine.
It’s pretty sad how little Russia actually reaches the world economy. They ship oil and … that’s about it.
richardh@12: unhackable, but it couldn’t even charge one phone, never mind two phones and a laptop.
@numerobis #23
They used to export rocket engines, most notably the RD-180, but not anymore. Of course, it’s replacement (the BE-4 from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Horizon) isn’t ready yet, so I guess there’s still hope for them on that front.