I have question about Apollo Era mission control center?

[Pawelk198604]

How it was possible that in Houston in late 60's they have all this charts and graphs on big screen while i had my first computer in 1996 and i mostly need write all commands in command line and get most output as text ? 

Edited October 21, 2017 by Pawelk198604

[Mr. Peabody]

Government takes technological priority. And also because they needed that equipment when you didn't.

[Bill Phil]

Neither of those are really comparable, but it boils down to cost. Could you have purchased a PDP-1(hey, it can run SpaceWar!)in the 60s? Probably not. So it's probably an example of Moore's Law. Tech gets better and better, for a while at least. Back in the 90s megabytes of RAM cost hundreds. Now, Gigabytes cost tens. Heck, I could go to a store and buy hundreds of gigabytes worth of storeable memory in a thumb drive.

[tater]

 

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Neither of those are really comparable, but it boils down to cost. Could you have purchased a PDP-1(hey, it can run SpaceWar!)in the 60s? Probably not. So it's probably an example of Moore's Law. Tech gets better and better, for a while at least. Back in the 90s megabytes of RAM cost hundreds. Now, Gigabytes cost tens. Heck, I could go to a store and buy hundreds of gigabytes worth of storeable memory in a thumb drive.

This, you can get lots of stuff if you are willing to spend an billion, rather than 100
You have supercomputers today using perhaps 20.000 high end server chips, 24 core i7 but optimized for server use. 
And you can buy them, much the same back then, you could get lots of stuff if you had lot of money and talked to ibm. 

 

[Brotoro]

33 minutes ago, tater said:

 

So the plotter was like a big rear projection computer-controlled Etch-a-Sketch?

Edited October 22, 2017 by Brotoro

[razark]

The big screens were driven by an entire complex behind the screen, projecting it.  The Batcave and associated machinery behind the screen are bigger than the MOCR in front of it.

All the fancy graphics were projected on the big screen.  The terminals that the controllers used had text-based displays, or even analog instruments.

[DerekL1963]

2 minutes ago, razark said:

The big screens were driven by an entire complex behind the screen, projecting it.  The Batcave and associated machinery behind the screen are bigger than the MOCR in front of it.

The equipment behind the "Batcave" isn't just about the big screen, it also drives the displays down in the MOCR and in the SSR's and Recovery Room as well as the projection display in the Recovery Room.  And there's actually two rooms, the one to the right ("Display and Timing") was part of the same complex.

[razark]

3 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

The equipment behind the "Batcave" isn't just about the big screen, it also drives the displays down in the MOCR and in the SSR's and Recovery Room as well as the projection display in the Recovery Room.  And there's actually two rooms, the one to the right ("Display and Timing") was part of the same complex.

True, but I was actually looking at the Batcave compared to the rows of consoles.

But the fact that all that other machinery is needed to drive the consoles tells you something about 1960's computers, too.

[DerekL1963]

17 minutes ago, razark said:

But the fact that all that other machinery is needed to drive the consoles tells you something about 1960's computers, too.

The displays for the big screen (which could come from a variety of sources), the  displays on the consoles (which had data from a variety of sources), the little screens (TV monitor system, again a variety of sources), plus routing the commands etc... from the consoles out to the computers and the rest of the world.  (Oh, and the simulation system too.  And then there's the various trainers/simulators outside of MOCR that it could be hooked up to.)  It's actually pretty sophisticated system for it's day, and not all of it computerized.  (Though it would be today.) 

And it's not just that computers were bigger (and slower)...  with numerous data sources and destinations, the physical terminations and interconnection hardware would have taken up a fair chunk of room.