People also forget that most of the actual calculations were done on paper first; the computers were basically just executing precalculated instructions.
These are multiple printouts of the code. The computer did not only execute precalculated instruction. (This would be a sequencer BTW.). Try it yourself AGC.
I’m not quite sure if even that is correct. The AGC, as far as I understand it, did do quite a bit of calculation on the fly and was essentially the first digital fly by wire system. It did rely on input from the crew and ground control for eg correcting its state vector etc etc, but it even has dedicated vector instructions if I recall correctly. Can’t really precompute all that much when you can’t be sure things will go to plan and you’re dealing with huge distances. It did have eg separate programs for different phases of the flight but they weren’t really precalculated as such, more like different modes that eg read input from different sensors etc etc.
The US space program was pretty big on having a human in the loop though, much more so than the Soviet one which relied more on automation and the pilot was more of a passenger in a sense, sort of a failsafe for the automatic systems.
The book Digital Apollo goes into all this this in more detail, I can highly recommend it if you’re a ginormous nerd like I am and think that computers we’ve shot into space are endlessly fascinating
Compute intensive stuff usually demands those levels of RAM. I know for gaming the recommendation nowadays is 16GB while 8GB are considered “works for now”. There are some games though that still benefit from more RAM (I upgraded to 32GB on my old PC for a Beta of a Sim game as it maxed out my 16GB to the point of lagging my PC)
You don’t think you’ll ever really use all 32GB at the same time until you’re running a virtual machine or two and open task manager to see that you’re consistently using over 82% of your RAM, which happened to me today.
Well… You need like what, 3 floats for position and 4 more for orientation. Multiply that by 3 to get velocity and acceleration values. Then I don’t know a few more floats per sensor and you have your whole state space in a few bytes.
Meanwhile a single image is like a megabyte so yeah.
Source: it’s past midnight and I should have gone to sleep ages ago
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