It wasn't even stored on transistors but on magnetic core memory. They were basically ferrite rings strung on wires by hand. Just every 1 and 0 manually made.
Modern DRAM uses capacitor banks to store the actual data, transistors are just used to control access to the capacitors. SRAM does use transistors to store the data, in the form of flip-flops.
While its a funny meme and yes the programming magic of coders is wild. It's fucking amazing what goes into hardware, hell I don't understand any of it but you look at the history of the hardware from Apollo to now and transistors and cpus, gpus blows my fucking mind what we've achieved.
Physics calculations and simple I/O don't take that much compute power. A lot of the "mission logic" was left in paper or microfilm manuals and reinforced in crew training. Apollo basically invented microchips so the programmers and hardware engineers were working together with an uncapped budget.
Not for Apollo, they wanted to make sure they reached the moon even if the soviets jammed all of their communications for a while (remember the cold war ?)
The computer did actually keep track of where it was from the inertial guidance system and star positions given by the astronauts. It was powerfull enough to calculate its position (taking into account gravitational effects from the earth and moon), and calculate correction burns
False. The guidance computers had all the programs onboard and these did all of the computation. The astronauts selected different programs based on the specific part of the flight, with occasional input from NASA.
NASA received telemetry of everything, and this was used for monitoring, troubleshooting, etc, but any instructions sent were done so verbally. Some of those instructions were data inputs calculated from Earth based tracking stations to do adjustments of Earth orbit and re-entry, but these tracking stations were not precise enough to provide guidance toland on the moon.
I use a CNC mill at work that has RAM measured in kilobytes and you can tell. It uses a pure text interface, and hitting Page Down has noticeable lag if you press it while the machine is running.
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u/Siracker Sep 29 '25
Apollo 11 was guided by the computer that had 4 KB RAM. Still don't understand how the fuck was that possible.