The image above is a photo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1964, taken from this link at space.com. As the article states, it was used for controlling unmanned space flights, and it has been designated an historical landmark and is still in use.

The reason I find this image particularly interesting is because the cel phone you have in your pocket or purse is infinitely more powerful than all the machinery you see here. To come up with specific numbers is meaningless, because the magnitudes are so significant.

To show how significant they are, I found some interesting comparisons at this link. The highlight is that they compared the Apollo moon landing craft – the spacecraft that took us to the MOON – to the very early IBM PC XT, the computer than ran Visicalc which we discussed in class, and started the computer revolution we are still experiencing today. A picture of it is below to give context.

Well, it turns out that the Apollo 11 spacecraft – the WHOLE spacecraft – had a whopping 2k of memory. That’s right, 2 kilobytes of memory. Some phones today have 2 *gigabytes* of RAM, although it’s not quite the same thing. The PC XT above had 16k, and it was only 10 years after the Apollo 11 mission.

The software, as the article goes on to state, was a different story. Incredibly advanced for its time, it used true multitasking along with a virtual machine (analogous to running a different system that uses a completely different language within the original system), and did it all with that limited amount of memory.

It’s no secret machines are as powerful as they are. Never mind spacecraft, it is a violation of federal law to ship an Xbox or Playstation game console to certain countries because their hardware is so powerful they could, theoretically, be used as a missile guidance system.

Additional note: I wanted to make a reference to the old Casio calculator watches that were popular in the 70’s and 80’s, specifically noting their allotted memory, if any, but no matter how hard I looked I could not find those specifications. I did however, find this article originally published in Time magazine in 1975, which contained the following sentence, and I assure you I am not making this up:

“The next development in watches, a few Christmases hence, will be the nuclear timepiece, powered by a radioactive cell that will last 50 years.”

Ponder that statement.