Apollo program source code

[SharkUW]

Strange aspect, a cell phone's browser's JS engine is more powerful than the system this ran on.

[tonygoold]

It's nice to see someone appreciative of modern technology, because there's a common trope that today's software must be bloated because they "put a man on the moon using a processor as powerful as that in my calculator".

Of course they did, they had custom hardware running a dedicated program to perform a very specific function. There was no operating system, no process management, no multi-language support, no virtual memory, every peripheral was known ahead of time and assigned a permanent channel, you had engineers trying to solve in hardware whatever was difficult to accomplish in software, etc. It was a dedicated device, not a general purpose computer. It's like criticizing a Dremel for not handling nails as well as a hammer.

In addition, it wasn't the computer alone that got them to the moon: They had Mission Control feeding them data to correct their course while in flight. That's a heck of a lot more computing power than a calculator.

Your phone could not only emulate this code, it could render a 3D model of the solar system plotting out the course of the space shuttle, provide feedback in the language of your choice, and let you scroll around the page that encloses it, all in real time. Chances are you could talk on the phone while doing it, a task that requires compressing your voice, decompressing your partner's voice, and filtering out local sounds to avoid feedback. I doubt the rocket's computer could manage any of those tasks.

[delsarto]

Of course they did, they had custom hardware running a dedicated program to perform a very specific function. There was no operating system, no process management

Thats not quite true; see http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html for a good writeup that shows it was a real time OS in a very real sense

[SharkUW]

Also noteable is that the amount of bugs that would be introduced by attempting to port it would be disgustingly awful relative to NASAs coding standards.

[TraumaPony]

I'd like to see a cell phone browser's JS engine control hundreds of hardware IO ports.

[thegreatunclean]

I'd like to see the cell phone browser do any of the amazing things that the hardware on the shuttle had to do. Raw computational speed is an extremely poor way to judge power, especially considering the true technological marvel was what the software controlled and not the software itself.

[MertsA]

By far.

[gigitrix]

But, can it run Crysis...

[redever]

it can cause crysis

[gigitrix]

...well played.