Top ten stories about the moon and technology

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

I’ve enjoyed watching ITV’s various moon-related programmes over the last few days, culminating in last night’s docu-drama (dreadful name) about the moon landing.

And even though the greatest “drama” they could rustle up at the end was for a broken switch (”The switch has broken” “So it has” “How did that happen?” “I don’t know” “Let’s ask Houston if it’s on or not” “Okay” “It’s on” How will I switch it off?” “With my handy fountain pen” “That should work”) the programme as a whole really drummed home the message of what an incredible feat the moon landing was.

And, naturally, being of an IT bent, I started idly wondering about the horsepower inside the Apollo 11 and the lander. It’s well documented/alleged that the computer inside the Apollo 11 was roughly similar in power to a calculator, but naturally the reality is so much more complicated. You can compare numbers of transistors, amount of memory, lines of code – but fundamentally you’re comparing peanuts with horses. (more…)

Bouncing messages off the moon

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Radio nerds celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings this week by bouncing radio waves off the moon. It’s a five second round-trip, even for a radio wave, so the conversations were rather stilted. But what an interesting tribute it was.

Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?

Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?

No, probably not.