Al Gore said in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president that “there is more computer power in a PalmPilot than in the spaceship that took Neil Armstrong to the moon.” Can that be true, or is Mr. Gore’s lunar reference simply loony?
Don’t you dare bust on the Gore-man he invented the internet…Dammit!
see http://exn.ca/apollo/home.cfm for Apollo 11 info
It realy depends on what is being defined as “computer power” for the Apollo 11? Number crunching ability of the most powerful CPU onboard, total transistors onboard? … etc etc etc. The Palm Pilot probably does have more raw CPU based, number crunching horsepower in it’s little chip than anything that was onboard Apollo 11. Also consider that given the conservative nature of incorporating new electronics into a mission that Apollo 11 was probably using 5-10 year old CPU technology onboard at the time it launched in 1969 which means that the CPU’s onboard were vintage early 1960 design. Remember this was over 30 years ago, a time when a portable radio having more than a few “transistors” was a big deal.
So yeah… the little Palm Pilot could probably have kicked number crunching ass on any of the ur-CPU tech of the early 60’s but… how the sleek, un-shielded little Palm CPU would have fared in outer space where the cosmic rays are a poppin’ vs the clunkier 60’s computer tech is another story entirely.
Of course, for the weight of all the 60’s computer tech you could just add 20 pounds of lead sheilding for your palm pilot and still come out ahead.
For the record, Palm Pilots use a Motorola Dragonball processor (68328 family), which is based off the 68000 series, the processor used in the original Macs. I don’t remember typical Mac speeds, but most palms run at 16-20 MHz, depending on the model, which I’d guess is about the same speed as early Macs. There is no floating point hardware on the Dragonball, though (I don’t remember if the first Macs had that or not). A Palm Pilot has between 2 and 8 MB of ram.
This was probably an order of magnitude (at least) more powerful than Apollo 11, maybe even two.
Arjuna34
Oops, forgot to mention that the Palm runs on 2 AAA batteries- probably a bit less power than the Apollo 11 computers 
Arjuna34
I remember seeing an interview with Ron Howard on Apollo 13 and he said the crew of 13 used the equivalent of a Commodore 64.
For an even funnier comparison: The astronomy department at Villanova University is still using a late-80s machine as their primary FTP server. I have a LEGO piece that has more computing power (measured in operations per second) than that server.
Hmmmm. When did Big Al say this? You don’t think he’s lurking around the SDMB, do you?
Sofa King:
Gore’s speech was on the 17th (the last night of the convention). The thread to which you linked had started on the 21st. So at least one thing we can be sure he’s not guilty of is lurking around these boards.
By the way, would there have been a way for me to have known about the prior thread (short of scanning and guessing about every heading on the General Questions board, e.g., by searching for keywords in the headings) before posting mine?
I have to confess to a certain awkwardness with the search feature here, myself. It’s up in the top right corner of the page. Your question is a good one, which I like seeing answered in concrete terms.
I based my statement in the other thread from an NPR interview with an author of a book (neither of which I can recall now) on the Apollo 11 mission. He said that the LEM computer had roughly the same computing power as a Super Nintendo. I said Playstation to keep the analogy current, and to hedge my bets a little.
The problem with such an analogy is that it is an apple and oranges comparison. The LEM’s navigation computer was a custom made, purpose built machine that did what it had to do and little else, while a game console (or a palm, for that matter) has a certain amount of versatility, and features that the LEM (and the whole Apollo system) neither had, nor needed. I don’t know if the various devices are being compared on a strict calculations per second basis, or if other considerations, such as three dimensional rendering ability, are included. Both seem to have validity, as most of the computers on Apollo were for plotting a three-dimensional trajectory.
Gore’s comment, which I am a little embarassed to have inadvertantly parroted, would have to be based more on number-crunching, I think, than my own–not too many people play Quake III on palms, yet, but they’re getting close. Either way, it’s a fun comparison which I think is worth further defining.