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 number zero or one. This means that the Apollo computer had 32,768 bits of RAM memory.

In addition, the computer has 72 KB Read Only Memory (ROM), which is equivalent to 589,824 bits. This memory is preprogrammed and cannot be changed after completion.

One alphabet character - for example "a" or "b" - usually takes eight bits to store. That means the Apollo 11 computer won't be able to store this article in its 32,768 bits of RAM. Compare this to cell phones or MP3 players which can store much more, often containing thousands of emails, songs, and photos.
Phone memory and processing

To use more concrete terms, the latest phones usually have 4 GB RAM. That is 34,359,738,368 bits. This means one million times more phone memory capacity (1,048,576 to be exact) than the Apollo computer had in RAM. Furthermore, the iPhone also has up to 512 GB of RAM memory. That's 4,398,046,511,104 bits, seven million times more than the guidance computer.

But memory isn't the only thing that matters. The Apollo 11 computer had a processor - an electronic circuit that performs operations on an external data source - running at 0.043 MHz. The latest iPhone processor is estimated to run at around 2490 MHz. Apple doesn't advertise processing speed, but many others have calculated it.

This means that the iPhone in your pocket is 100,000 times more powerful than the processing power of the computer that landed humans on the moon 50 years ago.


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