Apollo 11 moon mission reincarnated as website Forty years after Neil Armstrong made his historic first steps on the moon, Apollo 11 is beginning the same trip to the lunar surface this week via the internet. The website WeChooseTheMoon.org was launched today, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum to recreate the lunar mission minute-by-minute as …
Fun idea. But are they using historically correct technology to make that website? Tiny blue-gradient letters on a black background make the captions almost completely illegible. They may be the smartest guysin the room, but someone needs to send a Saturn V up the designer's bums...
Hmm... I wonder why? Oh yeah, there was no WWW / Internet in 1969!! At least not like it is today.
I read this a few weeks ago and found it interesting. On page 15 it talks about how one model of those "early" mainframe computers was used to control the Apollo missions.
Love the thought, lets not go to the level that we're using technology to type this that still exceeds what we're using to pilot the current space endeavour (English spelling, by way of our French friends).
Mine's the one with a Sinclair calculator still running 0/1 in the overheating pocket.
Back in the early '80s, the Smithsonian in Washington DC had an exhibit with one of the computers used to control the trajectory of an Atlas ICBM. It noted that the computers used to guide the Apollo missions to the Moon and back were not much bigger or more powerful, and that the average American schoolchild had a calculator that was as powerful, if not more so, than this machine.
And this was in the days when the four basic mathematical functions were all you got, unless you could find a really high-tech one with *gasp* percentages and square roots on it...
(ps I think the bit about "sound stage on **MARS**" means Tom was having a larf...)
Joke icon dude. The rest of us didn't need it, but he provided it for the special people amongst us.
In any event, this looks like a very cool website. Wonder if I'll bother staying up to watch the moon landing....again. ;-) Can't count the number of times I've seen that on documentaries.
It is something of a myth to suggest that a mobile phone has more computing power than it took to get to the moon. Sure, the Lunar Module itself had a tiny amount of processing power and memory, but on Earth, which was really doing the donkey work of the calculations, there were banks of machines, with many times the power and memory of a phone.
Given the propensity for the Chinese government to treat its corporations as part of the state, and charge those who go around trying to get compensation for broken contracts worth billions, as spies with state secrets (Stern Hu), the fact that china does not recognise intellectual property.
If they dont play fair with trade, dont expect them to play fair when they're the only people heading there.
Not normally Xenophobic, but its really rough what they're doing with Hu!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
