We need to figure out how to do our daily things with very few computing resources. Gaming and heavy workloads excepted, most things we do ought to be possible on 15 year old CPU’s and 2GB. All we need is efficiency and low expectations. Fuck em.
I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
We need to figure out how to do our daily things with very few computing resources. Gaming and heavy workloads excepted, most things we do ought to be possible on 15 year old CPU’s and 2GB. All we need is efficiency and low expectations. Fuck em.
It was already possible to do that. Then Electron came in and developers thought it was better to just release stupid apps that take 4 GB of RAM each.
“Believe it or not, straight to jail”.
Yeah. We went to the moon with, like, 1 MHz CPU and 2 KB RAM.
That’s maybe what was on the LEM. The total computing power including the mainframes “back home” was a wee bit more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_91
(Also besides the fact that it was 200000+ gallons of kerosene that did the “going”)
Not even. The Intel 8008 didn’t even break 1MHz and that was a few years later.
I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
Aldrin deliliberately ran the approach radar which was not in the standard operating procedure
This is the time for Permacomputing to shine.
[email protected]
And even gaming is possible with those specs: retro gaming and emulation, thousands of excellent games
If you take gaming out of the equation though I don’t really need any sort of computing power.
How did you write this? Are you a wizard?