Apollo 11: Reflecting on how far we’ve come technologically

Google Moon gives users a chance to view the Sea of Tranquility with-out the week long trip. [Image: Screengrab]

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 space landing, an event that achieved the simplest of impossible missions: perform a manned lunar landing. And among the wonders of the day, and the entire mission—when viewed from a 2009 perspective—is the relative modesty of the tools and technology that NASA had to work with, specifically, the main computer carried aboard the Apollo 11 capsule.

According to FlightGlobal (“Serious About Aviation”), the Apollo Guidance Computer, or AGC, had just 64KB of memory and only 0.043 MHz of processing power. That was enormous at the time, of course, but compare those specs with those of modern netbooks—the pint-sized laptops that are considered underpowered by today’s computing standards.

The typical netbook has over 100 GB of capacity – more than a million times that of the computer on which NASA staked an historic mission and the lives of three astronauts. And a netbook’s 1.6GHz processor is several thousand times faster than that of 1969’s AGC.

On the ground, the mission depended on a host of mainframe computers, including a number of IBM System 360/Model 75. Each of these IBMs occupied an entire large room (as shown in the photos) and cost at least $2 million.

Gesture control: Is it the next big thing?

Microsoft's new gesture controller for the Xbox 360 premiered this month at E3. (flickr:Jake of 8bitjoystick.com)

More devices are being equipped with what’s technically known as  “perceptual user interface,” or PUI -- the capacity to recognize and respond to mere human gestures. Some recent examples are the recent unveiling of motion and gesture controlled gaming devices by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

Do those announcements, and others -- like the Canesta system that lets you control your television or DVR with the wave of your hand  -- presage an imminent wave of, well, waving, pointing, and other gesturing to operate the gear in our homes?

Maybe not, according to a panel on new user interfaces at a Consumer Electronics Association conference last week. The panel spent more time talking about other ways to interact.

Like haptics: the technology where a surface interfaces with a user through the sense of touch. It’s already available on some touch screens in the form of vibration feedback. Certain Samsung phones, such as the Memoir and Impression , for example, offer vibration feedback to help you locate the keys on its virtual keyboard, and know when you are depressing them. There is also voice recognition, a recent addition to the upcoming iPhone 3.0 operating system, which the panel agreed, could unleash a host of third-party apps using voice controls.

The challenge with gesture control, as one panelist put it, is that we don’t have any universal body language for a lot of the actions we’d want gesture control to accomplish. For example, there’s no widely shared gesture that means “turn it off,” so programmers would need to invent one, and then hope users would be willing to learn it.