Examining the Apollo 11 computer technology that successfully landed on the moon
Fifty years ago, humans first landed on the moon. Astronaut Neil Armstrong at that time uttered a quote that has now become famous: "This is one small step for a person, one giant leap for mankind." Today, this incident is still one of the highest achievements of mankind. Despite the rapid technological advances since then, astronauts haven't actually returned to the moon since 1972. This is quite a surprise. Especially if we consider that in our handheld devices we now have more computing power than computers on the Apollo 11 aircraft. Also read: Scientists plan to open a portal to parallel worlds, how do you do it? Apollo 11 used to have one computer called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). The computer has 2048 words of memory that can be used to store "temporary results" - data that will be lost when there is no power. This type of memory is known as RAM (Random Access Memory). Each word consists of 16 binary digits (bits), with bits being the