News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The ancient technology keeping space missions alive. Parent comment

Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by ComputerGuru on Friday August 18, 2023 @04:07PM (#37181393)
The only context in which the technical difference between memory and disk can be glossed over is one where the audience is made of laypersons that wouldn’t understand the first thing about seekable vs random-access memory in the first place.

A tech-illiterate author/editor is the much more plausible explanation.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by jychang on Friday August 18, 2023 @05:12PM (#37182175)
On the other hand, a modern SSD is probably faster than RAM on a spaceship from the 90s. (Don’t quote me on this, I didn’t double check).

All of a sudden I had an urge to get MS-DOS to run with a SSD as memory. Unfortunately I know DOS can’t address 1TB of memory, but the mental image of it is hilarious.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The ancient technology keeping space missions alive by thamer on Saturday August 19, 2023 @10:31AM (#37189184)
I'm not sure you'll see this, but just in case: the Apollo Guidance Computer used RAM called "core rope memory", and the cycle time was 11.7 microseconds[1]. This isn't too far off from what the best SSDs can achieve for random reads at 8-10 microseconds[2], although these numbers are likely for their minimum block size of 512 bytes.

[1] https://history.nasa.gov/afj/compessay.html

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micron-finally-rolls-3d-xp...

[ Parent | on HN ]