I am old enough to remember watching all of the Apollo missions on TV. It is hard to believe it has been 50 years since the last one. Even harder to believe that we did it using slide rules when the most powerful supercomputers in existence had less computational power than a smartphone.
I think along those same lines... the use of the slide rule never ceases to amaze.
I had my trusty Lutz out just a couple of weeks ago.
That’s not quite true, the Apollo spacecraft itself, the Lunar module, the Command module, had little computing power, because of size and weight considerations.
The navigational computing power responsible was actually back on Earth, occupying entire floors at the MOC. They had some pretty heavy duty computing power available, but the results of all that number crunching had to be read up to the astronauts with manual input on the DSKY.
Smartphones need all that crunching power for the GUI and for multithreading numerous tasks simultaneously while running relatively inefficient code compiled or interpreted from human-friendly computer language. The pieces of critical code which actually interact with the hardware are mostly 'drivers', but in the spectrum of modern software drivers represent a relatively small patch. Most code is designed to interact with us rather our hardware.
In the days of Apollo virtually all the software interacted directly with the hardware, it was all drivers so to speak, and the very tight code was painstaking created manually by humans working at the machine language level. Tight code is almost magic.