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Comment by therein | Hacker News Reader

> It has a number of CPUs, the fastest of which is an 80486 running at 25 MHz.

Not unexpected but reading that now... Absolutely remarkable.

Specifically, a radiation-hardened 486. The type of equipment that can survive in space lags significantly behind what you would consider modern on a desktop computer. For example, the radiation-hardened PowerPC G3 is a popular choice. It will power the 2020 Mars rover too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

The 80486 was state of the art in 1990 when the Hubble launched, as it was released in 1989.

Was it installed as a later update? The PowerPC G3 was released in Apple computers in 1997, just a few years later.

Yep, the original main computer was a 1.25 MHz (!) DF-224 [1]. It was augmented on Servicing Mission 1 in 1993 with a 15 Mhz 80386 co-processor [2]. The 80486 was installed in 1999 on Servicing Mission 3A (STS-103) [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-224

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-61

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-103

Reading more about the DF-224...

It was roughly 45 centimeters (1.48 ft) by 45 centimeters (1.48 ft) by 30 centimeters (0.98 ft), weighed 50 kilograms (110 lb)

It had about 96KB of usable plated-wire memory (32K 24-bit words).

That seems like a lot of weight. I wonder how much was radiation shielding?

So not a data center, but like an Arduino.

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