Computing, Communication, and Logistics (Part I)

A battery of IBM computers that cost $3.5 million apiece and were the size of a car supported the moon landing.

Each could perform several hundred thousand addition operations per second, and their total memory capacity was in the megabyte range. Today, even a simple USB stick or Wi-Fi router is more powerful than these mainframes, let alone an iPhone. Computers are so ubiquitous nowadays that even a pocket calculator has much more processing power, RAM, and memory than the state-of-the-art computers in the Apollo era.

These sorts of comparisons aren’t quite fair, though. It’s like making a side-by-side comparison between the first airplane designed by the Wright Brothers and an F-18 fighter. The technologies are so different it is hard to make any useful comparison. With this in mind, one can only look in awe at the computer power each of us holds at their fingertips. Never mind, we use them for frivolous matters. Just imagine what you’ll be holding in your hand 20 years from now.