A Missile Named Mac

Did you notice the "many times a second"? We're a long, long way away from "many" today.

The 1st moon shot had a computer system of 8k. That was 8,192 bytes for program and data and Billy said 640k was enough for anyone!

Thank you paul for the stroll down memory lane!! It brought back many like, Hey were you named after that satellite (6:49)!! NO! I was named after a baseball player!! :coolsmile:

Sorry, but I just have to go off on a rant here:

Most youngsters won't remember that Bell Laboratories and Western Electric were research arms of the all encompassing telephone company.

Yes, kids, the telephone system was a monolithic company that stretched its arms and wires from sea to shining sea, rendering efficient and low cost phone service on a local level and charging you accordingly to place long distance calls. Until one day when Uncle Sam noticed that the telephone company was larger than the federal government, employed more people in meaningful jobs and turned a profit! It was such an embarrassment that Uncle Sam had to break up the phone company to save face and pave the way to larger and more efficient government programs. And Uncle Sam was glad to keep all that neat technology that the Bell Labs cooked up for national defense.

This history lesson has been brought to you by the ghost of Alexander Graham Bell. (You might recognize the name.)

Yes KDP, its just too bad that a large entity who has at least a margin control over it by the people stopped and broke apart a large entity whose only control was the whims of a select few shadowy figures with no public controls at all. Yes a very sad day for fascists everywhere.

I grew up down the street from a Bell Labs facility. Shadowy doesn't even begin to cover all the crap that went on around it and in it.

Lily Tomlin's Ernestine the operator used to say "We don't care we don't have too, we're THE phone company. If you don't like it try using two dixie cups and a string!" :lol:

Back home I'm paying about $50US for phone & DSL. That's unlimited talk to about 30 countries w/ 1hr of cell time and 24,000kBs of unlimited internet.

And in Northern Europe it's even cheaper. Here in the US the prices are out of site for some seriously poor service.

One Ringy-Dingy

Nice catch, Expat. In a parallel vein, the ultimate conspiracy theory movie for me is "The President's Analyst" (1967), in which the plot by TPC was to embed chips within every person on the planet so they could communicate instantly with anybody else on the planet.