Advertisement

Drudge Retort: The Other Side of the News
Friday, November 14, 2025

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket just launched an interplanetary mission on its second-ever flight -- and aced an epic landing at sea.

More

Alternate links: Google News | Twitter

Breaking News: Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, landed a booster from its New Glenn orbital rocket, matching a feat so far only achieved by SpaceX.

[image or embed]

-- The New York Times (@nytimes.com) Nov 13, 2025 at 4:24 PM

Comments

Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

I remember when NASA's launches back in the late 1960's would preempt all network TV shows for full and uninterrupted coverage of the events.

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-11-13 09:04 PM | Reply

NASA's launches back in the late 1960's would preempt all network TV shows

Most of those were manned, and using pretty iffy technology.

#2 | Posted by REDIAL at 2025-11-13 09:07 PM | Reply

@#2 ... Most of those were manned, and using pretty iffy technology. ...

Iffy? I'm not yet there. We got to the moon and back.

But under-powered compared to today?

Well, yeah.

How the IBM 7094 Gave NASA and the Air Force Computing Superiority in the 1960s (2016)
fedtechmagazine.com

... The IBM 7094 is regarded as one of the most powerful and advanced mainframe computers of the early 1960s. NASA and the Air Force used the 7094 for critical operations, and the mainframe played a large role in the Gemini and Apollo space program, as well as early missile defense systems to guard against intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. ...

he 7094 had a basic machine operating cycle of 2 microseconds, and a new processing unit that improved transfer instructions and let it compare operations. It also allowed for two instructions per core storage cycle, substantially reducing instruction cycle time.

A physically large device that used a cabinet to house its processing circuits, the 7094 had an amount of core memory that seems unbelievably miniscule today: 150 kilobytes, just enough to manage a handful of Microsoft Word documents.

Still, it is regarded as "the classic mainframe because of its combination of architecture, performance, and financial success: hundreds of machines were installed at a price of around $2 million," according to the book A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi. ...



150kB of memory?

Wow.

#3 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-11-13 09:19 PM | Reply

@#3

I remember my first PC here. It was an IMSAI 8080, circa late 1970's for me.

It was assembled from a kit. Assembled, as in, soldering components onto a circuit board, not assembling pre-made circuit boards.

It had 64KB of memory, with an Intel 8080 CPU running at a whopping speed of 2MHz.

It ran CP/M with a word processor and a spreadsheet (VisiCalc).

It booted up from a paper-tape copy of CP/M. In order to boot it up, I had to enter a 100 or so binary instructions via the switches on the front panel.

Image from Wikipedia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080



#4 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-11-13 09:34 PM | Reply

I still have my Apple II. Originally it came with 48K of memory. Spent a fortune (hundreds of 1980 dollars!) to add 16K to get a "full" 64K of memory. One had to become skilled in assembly language (or even machine language: hexadecimal!) to make good use of that small quantity of RAM.

#5 | Posted by TrueBlue at 2025-11-14 12:09 PM | Reply

The following HTML tags are allowed in comments: a href, b, i, p, br, ul, ol, li and blockquote. Others will be stripped out. Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed.

Anyone can join this site and make comments. To post this comment, you must sign it with your Drudge Retort username. If you can't remember your username or password, use the lost password form to request it.
Username:
Password:

Home | Breaking News | Comments | User Blogs | Stats | Back Page | RSS Feed | RSS Spec | DMCA Compliance | Privacy

Drudge Retort