July 31, 2009, The Computer Corner, By Charles Miller

A few days ago an anniversary with great personal importance snuck up on me and I let it pass without mention here. Four decades ago Apollo XI landed on the moon, culminating one of the most intense periods of scientific development in history.

Along with many youths of that time, I was enthralled with the space program and several times I traveled from my home in Texas to Cape Canaveral to witness firsthand the rocket launches. The Saturn V was bigger than anything most people could imagine, but years later the enduring legacy of the gigantic moon rocket continues to be its smallest parts.

Fulfilling President Kennedy’s challenge of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth was not just about building gigantic Saturn V rockets. The Apollo missions never could have been successful without a nervous system in the form of computers and the mainframes of the day had to be miniaturized down to a size small enough to fly.

The computers that formed the basis of the Apollo Guidance and Navigation System (AGS) were at the cutting edge of sixties technology. NASA did not create a personal computer, but a highly-specialized computer that could do one thing, and nothing else. It could navigate a spacecraft and that job it did quite well.

Those computers were the first to use integrated circuit technology. The computer in the lunar Lander had 5,000 primitive integrated circuits and weighed 30 kilos. It was as powerful as some mainframe computers of the time, yet small enough to fly to the moon.

The success of that mission started the race to miniaturization that subsequently led to the invention of the microprocessor in the seventies. Improvements in manufacturing technology made it possible to mass-produce those microprocessors which were then used in increasingly less expensive computers of many types.

In the eighties, personal computers became popular with individual consumers as they became useful for many tasks, including bookkeeping, word processing and other repetitive mathematical tasks.

The push for miniaturization continues to this day, albeit with less conspicuous achievements than having a man walk on the moon.

The semiconductor industry constantly works to replace current computer technology with smaller chips having more features. Its goal is to get more transistors on a single chip, because increasing the number of transistors leads to more power in the computer, cell phone, music player and other electronic devices. The chip makers have succeeded in their quest to the extent that older computers are obsolete almost as quickly as they are put on the market.

Still the quest for miniaturization goes on. Already able to create chips with features as small as a thousandth of the width of a human hair, the manufacturers are now exploring the creation of even smaller microscopic chips with nanotechnology.

The future of miniaturization of computer technology also will be in three-dimensional circuits. Someday cubes will replace the two-dimensional chips in use today and when that happens, computer power will increase exponentially.

When man first landed on the moon 40 years ago, one philosopher said, “The world is different today than it was yesterday.” He could have added “and will be different again tomorrow.”

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.