In modern terms, what we might consider NASA’s first PC was the Apollo guidance computer, a fundamental piece for the arrival of man on the moon. It was a simple computer that reached the moon landing with a processor less powerful than the first personal computers and only 4 KB of RAM. However, NASA’s computing concept is due to the huge mainframes or data servers they are supposed to use in their facilities. Now, does NASA’s legendary supercomputer exist?
What do we understand as NASA’s PC?
Today, this concept refers to a very powerful computer, so much so that it is above what ordinary people have at home and whose power allows them to do things that in theory would be impossible to do with a simple computer like the one we have at home In other words, what we commonly call, a computer cucumber.
However, it’s a more outdated concept than anything else, but it has its historical origin in the special race. The reality is that many of the things we use on our computers today on a daily basis originated from the powerful computers of the US space agency.
The Special Race and the Advancement of Computing
Today, any small business that has an engineering load usually uses high-performance systems, usually servers or advanced workstations, which allow them to do their work collaboratively. These computer systems require much more power than a conventional PC and that is why the research and development center has one as its main computer system. It is found in the private sector, at the military level, public or a combination of all.
However, to solve concrete problems, concrete solutions are necessary. And curiously, the research and development of the various specialized agencies not only advanced different industries, but also served as a motivation for ever more efficient and faster architectures. Let’s not forget that we have to look for new problems to solve in order to motivate technological progress.
Thus, the concept of NASA PC comes from the fact that in its various challenges, said special agency had to develop new technologies to solve them. Think of it like what happens in Formula 1, where a lot of competition technology ends up being applied to commercial cars to a greater or lesser extent.
The CRAY, NASA’s first PC
Even though The NASA PC concept, we owe it mainly to CRAY and especially to the second version of it which was released in the mid-80s.
Traditionally, this is how graphics processors or GPUs found in graphics cards work. Since then, CRAY and other type systems, designed to execute multiple instructions in parallel at high speed, have been replaced by the use of graphics cards to perform such calculations. In other words, they use the same technology that you use in your gaming PC. That is, the NASA PC is not alien or long-out-of-this-world technology. As some conspiracy theorists with silver paper caps believe.
We owe you the current graphics card market
If we look at the history of today’s graphics cards, we will see that they are a continued evolution from the 3D cards of the late 90s and early 2000s. Most of them were created by former employees of companies like Silicon Graphics and other companies. What is common knowledge, however, nobody knows that the first workstations with the ability to generate 3D graphics in real time, we owe it to NASA being SGI’s main customer in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. and not only on workstations, but also servers and supercomputers.
In other words, because in the 1980s the US space agency needed to perform 3D simulations for its astrophysics work more efficiently than the traditional CAD/CAM programs of the time, it led to the need for a new type of hardware, the advanced technology of which is what we use to play our favorite 3D games.
Other technologies originally created for NASA
- They were the first to set up a TCP/IP network to communicate their different computers.
- In order to be able to have the different bases communicate directly with each other, they deployed the first WAN or broadband network so that teleworkers could connect.
- The first distributed computing system, where each worker could take a share of the power of supercomputers to speed up their work, was first implemented at NASA.
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