A SIM Card vs. the Apollo Guidance Computer

I’m a bit of a fanboy of the Apollo moon program of the 1960s, so a recent post by Nick comparing the computing power of a typical SIM card today with the Apollo Guidance computer of the 1960 definitely sparked my interest!

Short story even shorter: The SIM card has the same or more RAM and ROM memory as the Apollo guidance computer that took people from the Earth to the Moon and back. Also, with a clock rate of 5 MHz, I don’t think computational power would stop that SIM card from taking us to the moon again. But then, on the other hand, the Apollo guidance computer had an interface unit to a lot of systems on the spaceship, which a SIM card with the few connectors on top of it obviously couldn’t replicate. But still, an interesting comparison from many angles!