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Originally Posted by beepbeep
there were computers, allright. Slow but used in smart and frugal way.
I believe control used IBM 360's and lander computer had whopping 4K of RAM and 36k of ROM, both magnetic core memory. It even had "multitasking" of cooperative type (akin Windows 3.11)
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I work on the direct descendants of the System 360: the zServer. I can tell you all about IMS, VSAM, VTAM, etc... Heck, I'm pretty sure we still have code running that was written in the 60's on punchcards...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile
Also keep in mind that most computer technology used at NASA (at least the stuff used on manned & unmanned space vessels and aircraft) is pretty primitive - they're made to be robust, redundant and reliable - and power/weight efficient. Having oodles of processing power is seldom a concern.
It's possible to do lots of stuff with 286/386 processor technology - it all comes down to how efficiently the software is written to be and let's face it - most of the stuff written today for commercial use is very bloated, dependent on ever-increasing amounts of memory and power and saddled with unnecessary crap. NASA's stuff is very minimalist and streamlined so they can "do more with less". And yes, I do know this for a fact.
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The art hasn't been completely lost. Trust me, I've spent many years rewriting bloated, inefficient code from vendors. I had one process that was taking 45 minutes to process a single transaction when the vendor gave it to me. Given that it has to process 100,000 transactions in a 2-hour window, this was simply unacceptable. By the time I was done rewriting the process (which is a series of very complex calculations), I had it down to .5 seconds a transaction. Yes, I realize that still would take 13 hours to process 100,000 transactions in serial, but running multiple instances in parallel fixed that part. The problem was when it was taking 45 minutes per transaction, we simply couldn't afford the hardware to fix the problem that way, and it wouldn't have done much good because the data access routines caused too much contention anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BGCarrera32
The country had national pride. The president (JFK) put a goal in front of everyone and said we we're gonna get there by the end of the decade. And we did.
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Today, it takes ten years just to do the environmental impact studies before you can start.