Blame the Operating System

At the time of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, according to a scare documentary I saw recently, the whole of NASA only had as much computing power as "a modern laptop".

Whoo. Scary. Until you realise that a modern laptop can perform about 90 million instructions per second! A modern laptop would qualify as a supercomputer by the standards of ten years ago!

I've used a modern laptop recently. It took three and a half minutes to fully start up, and just over a minute to shut down. If it's a supercomputer, why is it so slow?

"My DVD drive would not release the disk, the software would not listen to me and close. And Windows would not allow me to do anything anymore including rebooting!

Then all of a sudden, about three minutes into this fiasco, my DVD drive opens!  I quickly grab the disk, close the drive, and flick the surge protector.  I breathe a sigh of relief then start scratching my head in amazement.

I have a Microprocessor in my system that can easily handle over 120 million instructions per second.  If you like to get real geeky with me, consider this.  The Intel processor I'm using is able to calculate the SuperPI number crunching benchmark to one million digits in about 100 seconds.  It takes my Pentium 4 system less than two minutes to figure out this benchmark, and the Pentium 4 is notoriously bad at FPU calculations.  On a bad day, this beautiful system can do some very serious powered thinking, and at speeds that even ten years ago NASA didn't have in their control rooms.

But, the very same system can not "think” through the decision to release the freakin' DVD drive without locking up for three minutes?  How's that possible?  The answer lies not with the hardware but the Operating System that drives the hardware."

I'll let you read the rest of this excellent little article.