614
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices — 128GB of DDR5 now $3,399
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
614 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
87412 readers
6906 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah. We went to the moon with, like, 1 MHz CPU and 2 KB RAM.
Not even. The Intel 8008 didn't even break 1MHz and that was a few years later.
I don't know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of "fly a spacecraft" tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11's crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with "pay attention to me" interrupts, and it couldn't service the radar and run through it's task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team's credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
Very cool, thanks for the detail.
Aldrin deliliberately ran the approach radar which was not in the standard operating procedure
That's maybe what was on the LEM. The total computing power including the mainframes "back home" was a wee bit more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_91
(Also besides the fact that it was 200000+ gallons of kerosene that did the "going")
That's still about 1000x less raw CPU performance than the cheapest smartphone on the market, though.
(E.g. a Blu View 5 Pro, which is the cheapest Tracfone is listing as in stock, for $30. Its Helio G36 uses 4 Cortex A53 cores at 2200MHz and 4 at 1800 MHz, and between 1-2 instructions per clock, giving between 16000-32000 million instructions per second. The IBM ran at 16.6 million instructions per second, per that Wikipedia link.)
(Looking at Walmart turned up a TCL K33 5G for only $20, but it uses a Dimensity 6300 cpu which is actually a little more powerful.)
Which just shows we waste tremendous computing resources on trash.
Agreed.