(Links borrowed from my weekly newsletter about the space industry called Orbital Index https://orbitalindex.com — check it out if you like this kind of nerdery.)
Purely out of curiosity, do we know the amount of memory a modern orbital rocket like the Falcon 9 has?
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9243/what-computer...
> The Falcon 9 has 3 dual core x86 processors running an instance of Linux on each core. The flight software is written in C/C++ and runs in the x86 environment.
Fantastic link, thank you for sharing.
http://www.righto.com/2014/10/how-z80s-registers-are-impleme...
http://www.righto.com/2020/03/inside-titan-missile-guidance-...
http://www.righto.com/2016/10/simulating-xerox-alto-with-con...
His AGC Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb...
His channel is full of fascinating retro-computing and EE videos.
The AGC was one of the very first computers to use integrated circuits, while the LVDC used hybrid modules. The LVDC used triple-redundant circuits with voting while the AGC was not redundant. The LVDC was a 26-bit serial computer, while the AGC was a 15-bit computer. The LVDC was built by IBM, while the AGC was built by MIT and Raytheon.
It's interesting that the two computers were different in so many ways.
Anyway, I think it should be more interesting to compare it with a modern rocket that uses a more specialized computer system, VxWorks comes to mind.
I mean compare it with mainframes vs cloud computing; with the latter, you use off-the-shelf hardware and build your software in such a way that you will randomly lose machines, BUT because cloud computing you'll automatically spin up a new machine in that case.