Apollo 11 50th Anniversary - All that Science

[James Regan + 1,776]

Just feel it’s worth mentioning how much these guys did for us, as we hold the piece of tech in our hands or type away on our PCs or Macs we should give a big round of applause to the brave men, amazing science and our old friend gravity.

Without Gravity we would not have required to overcome that downward force of 9.81Nm2 and required thrust.

That one great step for man and a giant leap for mankind left a massive carbon footprint on the moon.

Should we have done it?

PS from the moon you can clearly see that the earth is round.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

What is amazing is that this accomplishment was made in the era of slide rules (remember those?)!

You now have more computing power in a single calculator than they had available in the entire space program (or so I was told).

They said that it was like trying to the edge of a piece of paper from a football field away.

A truly impressive piece of work from the the boys and girls at NASA.

[John Foote + 1,135]

On 7/20/2019 at 5:43 AM, Douglas Buckland said:

What is amazing is that this accomplishment was made in the era of slide rules (remember those?)!

Hell, I still own a couple. Probably the last of the generation that went to school using exponential notation and 3 significant digits. 

My first calculation, a Sinclair, only did scientific notation. And only went to 6 significant digits. I mean, really, what use is all those extra digits? It was kind of useless for adding and subtracting. That's what pencils and were for.

[James Regan + 1,776]

2 hours ago, John Foote said:

Hell, I still own a couple. Probably the last of the generation that went to school using exponential notation and 3 significant digits. 

My first calculation, a Sinclair, only did scientific notation. And only went to 6 significant digits. I mean, really, what use is all those extra digits? It was kind of useless for adding and subtracting. That's what pencils and were for.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 with 16kb Ram Pack to give me massive memory to play Flight Simulator. I never made it to a Spectrum, how things changed!!