No Chrome/Android Studio was there back that time

So I go buy a PC with 4K RAM and do my work on it, since after all, it reached the moon so no excuse why it cannot compile my code right?

RAM != speed

Back in the day men got by with stone axes carved from rock by hand. We should do that!

if you have terabytes of RAM it still does not mean your setup will be fast. RAM is nothing but amount of [temporary] storage space. Not speed.

thank God chrome wasn't there at that time. Otherwise, chrome would've eaten all the RAM alone

Yeah no shit Electron was not born yet

Stop comparing embedded, purpose-built machines to general purpose machines. Heck, if you keep doing that, it might turn out that the logic board of your microwave is better than your PC...

The Apollo 11 guidance computer actually overflowed its memory during landing anyway. Although that was mostly caused by bad timing rather than insufficient hardware.

CPU, GPU, RAM, bridges, storage space, storage speed, fragmentation (where applicable)...

All matter for speed.

also we can do amazing shit on 256 bytes of memory (Atari 2600/VCS) so this isn't really shocking to me.

Oh, it ran on an 8088 at just over 1MHz.

Assembly.

It literally only had to run on one computer, they had a huge team of literal rocket scientists backed by literally all of America and almost unlimited funding, and it only had to do one thing, and it only had to do it once.

It's a spaceship. It's a marvel of engineering and an American, and honestly, a human pride.

But four thousand bytes of memory was probably a lot for it's time. It's not like they were building cheap parts. This was the best of the best.

I don't know the specifics of the guidance system but I'm assuming it didn't run any graphics, and didn't hold large sets of data. I'm assuming it need only hold a few variables in memory to keep track of things like direction and velocity. I don't see any real reason it would need much ram at all.

@AlgoRythm That's the advantage of a purpose-built embedded system. Because they custom designed not just the system but also every single process that would run on it, they were able to calculate exactly how much memory was required for each operation, and exactly when they could flush that data out of memory to make room for the next procedure. So they basically designed the most efficient garbage collector ever, allowing the computer to run at 90% utilization during peak times of the landing.

And then they designed an overflow error handler that would soft-reboot the system by killing every process and then restarting them in their intended order, all without losing any critical data in memory. So when a hardware error (caused by the power supply, of all things) sent enough interrupts to the guidance computer to cause the memory to overflow, it did the soft reboot (a few times) to clear everything up. It definitely made everyone nervous though.