tl;dr - The Apollo 11 computer ran at 0.001GHz with 0.000002GB memory and 0.000032GB of storage (read-only at that). The display amounted to a few dozen 1-bit pixels.
And it took them to the Moon.
And it took them to the Moon.
"This display does not place a particularly heavy load on the computer, but when added to the existing load, was sufficient to generate the 1202 alarm."
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"102:38:26 Armstrong: (With the slightest touch of urgency) Program Alarm.
102:38:28 Duke: It's looking good to us. Over.
102:38:30 Armstrong: (To Houston) It's a 1202.
102:38:32 Aldrin: 1202. (Pause)"
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/25/1124164/-Neil-Armst...
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"102:36:18 Armstrong: (To Houston) Our position checks down range show us to be a little long.
102:36:21 Duke: Roger. Copy. (Heavy Static)
[In a post-mission analysis, Apollo Descent and Ascent Trajectories, Floyd Bennett notes that, at PDI, Eagle was about 3 miles farther downrange than planned, due to [..]"
->
... after that, Armstrong selected a landing site visually, and landed the lunar module manually. :)
[Mission Control] Thirty seconds. (Just Mission Control telling Neil Armstrong how many seconds of fuel he has left for landing) :)
Browsing through the Apollo 13 "spacelog", it's interesting how a lot of the lines in the Apollo 13 movie are very similar to the ones in real life.
Nowadays, we don't have price tags on anything anymore. Prices are fetched from a database using the UPC as a key, so if the computer's down, the buyer is out of luck. At a previous employer, we sold specialty goods to contractors, so we had strong relationships with our customers. I drafted a plan to print up pads of paper sale forms that looked more or less like our (80x24 greenscreen) order screens, so if we lost connection to the mainframe, we could still move product from the warehouse to the customers; we'd just give them the product and bill 'em later. It was a risky move, but not really any riskier than sending our customers across the street to our competitors. To my knowledge, they've never had to use the manual system, thankfully.
We may not be "completely dependent on computers" just yet, but we seem to be getting there.
Also, isn't it a little risky letting someone copy your credit card like that? Even if you trust the cashier not to steal the number, how do you know whether they're destroying the information after they're done with it?
(Disclaimer: I'm 29, so don't really remember a time when those things were commonly used.)
It's funny--29 doesn't sound particularly young, but I'm really suppressing the urge to call you a whippersnapper.
[1] http://img.ehowcdn.com/article-new/ehow/images/a04/b9/g6/cre...
For example on a $6.95 order hand over $12 and watch first for the bewilderment while keying in the amount and then the amazement when they give back the non-dollar bill change.
pedantic? yes. but as a fellow member of the "give-em-too-much-to-get-fewer-back" tribe, I feel that you might appreciate this particular bit of pedantry.
I remember talking to someone who had clearly never worked in retail, complaining about their god-given right as a consumer to have change made for them trumping an open-air market vendor's right to have change for the rest of their sales for the day.
1. A country side advertising campaign? 2. A state wide advertising campaign? 3. A local newspaper that serves the county?
As odd as it seems, that's the way it is here in the States (but I can sympathize, a friend from Sweden was horribly annoyed by the differences between sticker price and final price because of the tax rate).
Over time, one does develop a vague sense of how much their purchases will be taxed, but I would definitely support a measure that required merchants to charge no more than what's on the tag.
The LEM software was supposed to be capable of a fully automatic landing, but none of the astronauts rode it all the way down.
David Mindell's book "Digital Apollo" goes into these systems, and their development, in much detail; the discussion of the LEM user interface is in chapter 8.
After some minor conversion, the Atmega/Arduino has almost exactly same storage space and RAM. Only, the Arduino clocks at 16MHz. Still, awesome regardless.