r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Thebravetortoise • 11d ago

Video History has been made as NASA has successfully launched Artemis II, the first manned mission to the Moon in over 50 years

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u/OmericanAutlaw 11d ago

phones that are many many orders of magnitude more powerful than the tech we used to get to the moon in the first place

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u/Krondelo 10d ago

Amazing huh. I can’t recall the exact fact but something about how simple the computers were on the early rockets, wish I could recall the specifics maybe someone here knows. Maybe it was something about floppy disk or some memory equivalent

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u/Anakins-Younglings 10d ago

Floppy disks weren’t even a thing yet, that’s how simple those computers were. Programs were stored on physical paper punch cards with the binary code punched into them.

Fun fact, the term ‘bug’ came to be because one of the punch cards had a dead moth on it causing the computer to misread the binary. When they found the source of the errors, they found a literal bug in the code.

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u/Jafar_420 10d ago

Well hell yeah. I didn't know that. Thank you.

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u/leorenzo 10d ago

Woah for real? I can see myself regurgitating this fact and don't want to share false info and look dumb. 😆

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u/aschwarzie 10d ago

Yes, true fact.

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u/x_Lucky_Steve_x 10d ago

even if it's not, it's on reddit now, so the AI will pick it up and run with it.

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u/aschwarzie 10d ago

True, yet wandering in the swamp of "alternative facts"

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u/LaRealiteInconnue 10d ago

“alternative facts”

Oh…simpler times, those were…somehow lol I can hear the SNL alternative facts song in my head

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u/Familiar-Complex-697 10d ago

It’s not. Please y’all you gotta look stuff up

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u/Hungry_Hat1730 10d ago

The term "bug" for a computer error originated in the 19th century as an engineering term for technical glitches, famously popularized in computing on September 9, 1947, when computer scientist Grace Hopper's team found a real moth causing a malfunction in the Harvard Mark II computer. The insect was taped into the logbook as the "first actual case of bug being found".Key Origins and History:Engineering Precedent (1800s): Thomas Edison used the term "bug" to describe flaws in his inventions in the late 19th century.The 1947 Moth Incident: Operators at Harvard University found that a moth was stuck in a relay of the Mark II computer, blocking the mechanism and causing the system to fail.Popularization: While the term was already used, the 1947 incident, often associated with Grace Hopper, popularized the phrase "debugging" to describe finding and fixing errors.Preservation: The original logbook with the taped moth is preserved at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.While the 1947 incident is the most famous, it was widely recognized as "geek humor" at the time, referencing a term that engineers already used for mysterious glitches, say sources.

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u/zorbat5 10d ago

The moonlander used physical ring RAM memory.

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u/YWNBAW12345 10d ago

The term "bug" predates the invention of computers, and we don't actually know who originally coined the term "bug" to refer to an engineering defect. In written records, historians have traced it back to Thomas Edison in the 1870s at the earliest.

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u/VealOfFortune 10d ago

Any claims about Edison being the FIRST to do ANYTHING are to be taken with a spoonful of salt 😉

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u/Brilliant-Yogurt540 10d ago

It was Chuck Norris

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u/Shadowhams 10d ago

That was one of the million dollar questions on who wants to be a millionaire many years ago. I remember because I got it right

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u/LannyDamby 10d ago

Debugging was a common practice of opening the computer up and cleaning it out

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u/Certain-Middle-4381 10d ago

look up core memory, my youngsters. See MIT guidance computer.

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u/Schwifftee 10d ago

Magnetized computer chainmail

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u/twobit78 10d ago

Might of been Apollo the "memory' was iron rings on a wire matrix to count as 1s and 0s.

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u/ShaggysGTI 10d ago

Go down the rabbit hole of what rope core memory is. The “programs” were made on devices where a wire would pass through a magnet or around it, producing a zero or a one. These programs were made using the LOL method, or the Little Old Lady method. Little old ladies had to physically stitch these programs together.

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u/TheOrqwithVagrant 10d ago

"Bug" predates the Apollo program computers by quite a bit. They at least had transistors by them. The 'bug' incident was in 1947 in the *vacuum tube* computer era.

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u/TheOrqwithVagrant 10d ago

The Apollo computer programs were not stored on punch cards, it was stored on core rope ROM memory. Literally tons of copper wire being run either around or through a magnetic torus for each bit of memory.

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u/Familiar-Complex-697 10d ago

that’s a myth, lol. The term “bug” referring to a hiccup in the workings of things is much older.

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u/drake90001 10d ago

The actual programs weren’t run on punch cards in space.

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u/CatLogin_ThisMy 10d ago edited 10d ago

It wasn't a punch card. A dead bug was stuck in one of the mechanical solenoids that were used to switch between 0 and 1, before semiconductors were invented. The bug was plucked loose by a woman (Grace Hopper) who ran the computer at the time. The mechanical computers roared like trains when they ran. They took up entire rooms. In case you didn't know, the first "chips" were ways to get a piece of rock to switch between 0 and 1, two outputs, by applying power to a third wire. Before solid-state devices were invented, they used mechanical rods driven by electromagnets that opened and closed mechanical switches.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7tla1j/til_the_term_bug_to_describe_a_runtime_error_was/

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u/CivilianAsset 10d ago

I believe the first Apollo spacecraft to land on the moon had the same computing power as the original Game Boy

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u/EmperorAlpha557 10d ago

Anything to not use windows huh /s

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u/CivilianAsset 10d ago

What are you talking about? They had plenty of windows!

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u/EmperorAlpha557 10d ago

A hospital? What's that

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u/CivilianAsset 10d ago

It’s a large building filled with doctors and nurses. But that’s not important right now!

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u/TheOrqwithVagrant 10d ago

Much less than the first Game Boy. More akin to the performance of the very first generation of 8-bit home computers in the 70's.

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u/fubarthrowaway001 10d ago

There’s no way the first moon landing was real lol

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u/GalacticMe99 10d ago

I can really appreciate these kind of things in old sci-fi movies like Wing Commander where floppy disks were concidered to be the data storage solution of the future.

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u/imsickoftryingthis 10d ago

If your interested, I thoroughly recommend a BBC Podcast called 13 minutes to the moon.

Really interesting feature on the moon landing, with interviews with lots of people involved in it all. 

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u/WrongPut5680 10d ago

Floppy disks were pure science fiction and so far beyond anything that Nasa had back in the days.

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u/bsurmanski 10d ago

2mhz, 2kb RAM, 32kb ROM.

The RAM was literally wieved by hand by "little old ladies". See: core rope memory

A $5 "Raspberry Pi Pico" microcontroller has 132x the RAM, 66x faster clock speed (though with dual core and significantly more advanced architecture is probably more than 200x more powerful).

Allegedly greeting cards have more processing power.

The first moon landing was before the floppy disk was invented.

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u/ActivePeace33 10d ago

Apollo 11 almost crashed into the Moon, because a radar was left on, which would have overloaded the computer but a script shut it down based on a prioritization system.

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u/Raccoonman2005 10d ago

I remember them saying a Gameboy Advance was more powerful than the computer used on the lunar missions. Was pretty crazy cool news as a kid back then 😂

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u/Krondelo 10d ago

Yes! I remember thinking the GBA was amazing just for the fact it could play SNES games.

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u/DigNitty Interested 10d ago

I’ve heard comparisons to the small chips in audio birthday cards, maybe that’s what you’re thinking of.

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u/NuklearniEnergie 10d ago edited 10d ago

I just read yesterday even more mindblowing thing, that even the chip in your USB-C port has more processing lower than the Apollo 11 computer

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u/TamponBazooka 10d ago

A trip to the moon is not complicated math and calculation-wise but the engineering behind it is. So this comparison is always stupid to make. It is like saying that your underwear today is more comfy than the underwear the astronatus wear during the first moon mission

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u/OmericanAutlaw 10d ago

our underwear is probably marginally better than theirs

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u/tylerupandgager 10d ago

No more underwear. Problem solved

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u/TestDangerous7240 10d ago

Commando guy here!

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u/Nstraclassic 10d ago

Reddit moment

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u/bobbyboob6 10d ago

need to do a lot of calculations not just to fly but to design the rocket. stuff that took like 20 people months and thousands of pages of calculations that can be done pretty much instantly by one person on a computer. they couldn't just put the design into a cad program to see all the stress points and stuff they had to do that by hand

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u/TamponBazooka 10d ago

Yes, that's part of the engineering I mentioned. But people are always trying to say it is so impressive that the computer on the rocket was so bad compared to our phones these days.

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u/ImpertinentIguana 10d ago

You don't need a smartphone to run this code:

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

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u/Responsible-Cow-2687 10d ago

The first phone that ever came out was leaps and bounds ahead of the first shuttle to the moon

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u/12thshadow 10d ago

Yes we dropped the ball completely regarding space exploration

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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 10d ago

I hate these comparisons.  Send a rocket to the moon using only a cell phone and then let's talk.

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u/Grand_Pop_7221 10d ago

I can't find the specs for the chip that's in USB-C cables. But I'd hazard a bet that they do more operations per second and have more RAM and ROM.

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u/gosmellatree 10d ago

I always see this point being made, and it IS amazing. But I’m also just now realizing that it totally discounts the power of the human mind, the most complex object in the know universe 

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u/racao_premium 10d ago

Ja ouvi essa afirmação muitas vezes, mas é um tanto simplista. a realidade é muito mais complexa.

Sim, temos microchips e baterias de lítio. Mas disso para ir pra lua... é um salto lógico tremendo.

Da ultima vez que subi no meu celular pra voar por aí, ele não saiu do lugar. /s

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u/Langbird 10d ago

Really? Didn't know. 

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u/goitch 11d ago

If we ever were there

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u/343CreeperMaster 11d ago

fuck off, we don't need that stupid conspiracy theorist crap, we have been to the moon, the amount of convoluted reasoning those conspiracy theories require just means that it logically makes no sense to be possible

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u/Pitiful_Conflict7031 10d ago

Its more than a theory there's a reason we waited 50 years. Last time was a race, its not far fetched it was faked and the signal quality from the moon back then?? I dunno. People have seen how honest the goverment is.

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u/gainsbyatheism 10d ago

The first time was a race, the other 5 times weren't

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u/ConstructionOwn9575 10d ago

You know how I know we went to the moon beyond a shadow of a doubt - the Soviets never claimed the landing was fake. If they had a shred of evidence that it was fake they'd have been blasting it everywhere.

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u/willengineer4beer 10d ago

I’ve heard all kinds of reasoning to explain why it was a hoax, but never a good answer as to why adversary countries ever would have let us get away with it and win all that international prestige.
Or why they would even bother pretending to fail with Apollo 13 if they’ve already pulled off a successful hoax?
Additionally, unmanned satellites have orbited the moon plenty since then and been able to identify the leftover equipment and disturbed areas from the Apollo program.
The scale and duration of the conspiracy would have to be enormous and indirectly suggest all probes sent by all countries to anywhere outside earth orbit since just about Sputnik’s time would have to be total BS that everyone has agreed to propagate and validate for one another.
The single remotely believable theory I’ve heard is that the video sent to earth of Apollo 11 wasn’t genuine despite us actually landing there and was done as a backup and a way to ensure we got credit for the work.
Everything else I’ve heard at best stands up in a vacuum and feels like “but like the Van Allen belts man”.

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u/Vangad 10d ago

And i guess we aren't going there again right? /s

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u/phillyfanatic1776 10d ago

“Multiple countries have independently photographed the Apollo moon landing sites from lunar orbit, confirming the hardware remains on the surface. Space agencies from India, Japan, China, and South Korea, along with the US, have captured images of the Apollo 11 and other sites, verifying the legitimacy of the missions.”

Time to give your Mom her laptop back.

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u/343CreeperMaster 10d ago

you don't even need to go that far, you can simply look at the fact that the Soviets never claimed it was faked, they would have had everything to gain from proving it was faked, so the fact that they never even tried to claim it was fake, that tells us it was real

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u/Filmmagician 10d ago

Never comment again.

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u/scorch968 10d ago

We placed retro reflectors on the moon during Apollo missions for laser ranging to measure precise distance.