Thread by @cfishman

Your dishwasher has more computing power than the computers that flew us to the Moon.

But those computers, in the command module & the lunar module (picture below), were the smallest, fastest, most nimble computers of their era.

They changed the world.

fastcompany.com/90362562/this-…

2/ That those Apollo flight computers were so basic, but flew to the Moon, isn't a measure of how primitive they were.

It's a measure of how ingenious the men & women at MIT were, who designed and programmed them.

3/ In just 5 or 6 years, the MIT engineers took computing power that required space equal to four full-size refrigerators, and shrank it down to 1 square foot — about the size of a brief case.

And that computer was better, by far, than the four-refrigerator version.

4/ This is #12 in the series of 50 stories I did last summer chronicling the race to the Moon in the 1960s, and its impact back here on Earth, @FastCompany.

#Apollo51

fastcompany.com/90362562/this-…

5/ Apollo changed the course of computing—in the US & the world. Your iPhone can trace its lineage, & its usefulness, back to the computers the astronauts used to fly to the Moon.

The Apollo computer, by the way, had oversize keys so you could work it wearing spacesuit gloves.

6/ Last summer, '50 Days to the Moon,' was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1st Moon landing.

This summer, those stories of how we got to the Moon are a reminder that ordinary people can do the extraordinary—if asked.

All episodes below.

fastcompany.com/section/50-day…