Without the Apollo guidance computer we would not have gotten to the moon and back. Today It might be vastly out gunned by a simple smartphone but that’s not the point, it was made to do a job and the way it did it influenced computers for decades to come. …
Are Analogue Computer Hybrids The Future?
What does a mini moog synthesiser, a planimeter and a Kerrison Predictor have in common. Well they’re all forms of analogue computers. The mini moog synthesiser uses continuously variable voltage controlled oscillators, filters, Amplifiers and envelope generators to create musical or non musical sounds. Analogue synthesiser technology was originally based …
Are supercomputers still relevant today?
In my last video, I looked at how miniaturisation had dramatically and exponentially improved the computing power over the last 60 years and this reminded me of a video I did back in 2016 comparing a typical $1000 home computer and iPad Pro to the top 10 supercomputers of the …
How AI is Taking over your Phone
If you’ve bought a new smartphone in the last couple of years you may well have noticed that it’s quite a bit smarter and more capable than models of just a few years earlier. Now some might put it down to the CPUs, memory and general computer hardware becoming faster …
MOSFET – The Most significant invention of the 20th Century
What makes a truly world-changing invention?. There are many contenders for the most significant invention of the 20th century, the jet engine, the airplane, television, the internet, the computer and antibiotics are all worthy contenders but unless you live like an 15th-century hermit or a part of an undiscovered tribe, …
Apollo’s Forgotten Computer – The LVDC
Watching a Saturn V launch is still an awe-inspiring sight but there is far more going on than meets the eye. The Saturn V was far too complicated to fly by hand but contrary to popular belief it wasn’t the Apollo guidance computer or AGC in the command module doing …
How did the Apollo flight computers get men to the moon and back ?
There is much speculation by some, as to how the flight computer aboard the Apollo missions managed to get men to the moon when it had just a tiny fraction of the computing power of something like a modern smartphone. But this is quite misleading as there was not one …
7 key Inventions that Made the Modern World
The modern world is filled with amazing inventions but as newton stated “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” and this applies to the 7 key inventions in this video, which if any one of these had not occurred, our modern world would …
Top 10 Fastest Computers in the World – Compared to a PC or iPad Pro
If you need to model things like the worlds weather, nuclear reactions, molecular dynamics or simulate the first few seconds after the big bang, you’re going to need some pretty serious computing power but just how much more powerful are the top 10 supercomputers compared to the PC on …