[KarlInOhio]

It's said that the typical cellphone of today has as much computing power as did the computer onboard Apollo 11.I hope this guy wasn't buying this dinosaur to do his spreadsheets or anything.

The typical cell phone now probably has more computing power than all of NASA's ground computers in 1969. The Apollo 11 computer had 4 kB of RAM, 72 kB of ROM and ran at a break neck speed of 2 MHz. A typical smart phone will have tens or hundreds of megabytes of RAM, gigabytes of flash memory and run at around 1 GHz, all on top of having a wider bus width, fewer cycles per instruction and more powerful individual instructions. So roughly the cell phone will typically have 32,000x the RAM, 50,000x the permanent memory (or vastly more if you stick in a 32 GB card) and run at a few thousand times the speed.

[Regulator]

You should read some of the stuff on Dr. Richard Gran's website.

He was the Apollo GNC guy.

Click on the "News and Notes" link. It describes the whole process they had to go through to get the Apollo autopilot to work.

He used to do a road show called "Confessions of Columbus' Shipbuilders" where he presented all of this.

Enlightening if you're a Controls guy, entertaining if you aren't, he's a good speaker.