[graypegg]

That's a really interesting comparison! But does anyone know if any Apollo lunar lander was specifically notable at the time for the power of compute on board? I feel like the takeaway could be "wow, technology has come so far, the pinnacle of computing in the 60s is bested by this stupid keyfob."

It does make sense to me that automating only the bare essentials could be an intentional choice on a lunar lander. Relying on intense discipline + training of the astronauts combined with dirt-simple automation should hopefully put them in a good spot to resolve issues you couldn't predict earth-side. If you automated too much, the thing that goes wrong could be a bug IN the automation, which is obviously going to be harder to train for.

There's also power savings and weight, which I'm sure were big factors... so I can't imagine the guidance computers were great examples of the most performant compute 60s/70s had to offer.

(Also, not able to listen to the podcast right now, so if that idea gets dispelled during it, disregard me. Just basing this on what I can read over a coffee break.)

[monocasa]

> if any Apollo lunar lander was specifically notable at the time for the power of compute on board?

It was somewhere in between. Absolutely impressive for the physical volume and was consuming about 80% of all integrated circuits being produced at the time, but around an order of magnitude slower than the fastest computers at the time (and maybe more depending on how you want to calculate that. It's very back of the envelope).

And it did have huge amounts of automation. The modern multitasking hard RTOS was basically invented for the AGC. The pilots weren't super happy about it, but also it's generally considered that landing on the moon is essentially impossible without huge amounts of automation.