The Apollo 11 guidance computer had less processing power than your microwave.
That's not hyperbole. It ran at 1.024 MHz, had just over 2K of RAM, and less storage than a digital watch from the '90s. And yet... it got three humans to the moon and back, before TikTok, smartwatches, or even cable TV existed.
No patches. No OS upgrades. No spinning circle of doom while it rebooted mid-docking sequence. NASA engineers wrote lean, efficient code that had to work the first time, because there was no "remote into lunar module" option. Everything had to be stable, predictable, and testable with the tools they had - tools that would be considered laughably primitive by today's standards.
And yet... mission accomplished.
This is one of those examples that still resonates in IT today. Sometimes, simpler is better. We chase shiny frameworks, "AI-enhanced" this and "cloud-native" that, but forget that reliability and clarity are still the foundations of good systems. You can ship a sleek modern web app with 57 dependencies, five microservices, and auto-scaling containers... but if it crashes when the network hiccups or someone presses F5 twice, who cares?
And that's one of the reasons I love Microsoft Access. For the most part, it's simple, but very stable. It doesn't require a thousand dependencies or an always-on internet connection to function. It's been running small businesses, tracking inventory, handling invoices, and keeping things organized for decades. Is it flashy? No. (1) But it gets the job done reliably - and when something breaks, you can usually fix it yourself without needing a DevOps team and a Kubernetes cluster.
The Apollo software wasn't flashy. But it worked. Because they designed for the environment they were in, not the one they wished they had. And they built it to handle exactly what mattered - no more, no less.
We could use a bit more of that mindset in tech (and probably in life).
Stability. Precision. Purpose. It's not always about having more power. It's about using the power you have wisely.
I recently did a small database for someone, very basic for the tables, forms etc, but they (thought they) wanted flasher gradients and fancier buttons and text and stuff so I applied techniques from your videos and showed a sample and they liked but wanted more so I gave them more... 2 or 3 samples of more and more and then ut was done and they realized it was too gaudy and just slowed things down.
So they asked to simplify and sure enough, I stripped it back to basic gradient backgrounds and simple stuff with just using built in access controls and properties making subtle enhancements and they loved it.
Thomas Gonder
@Reply 7 months ago
My first university professor in "computers" (it was simply called that back then) worked on the NORAD software during the Cold War. It was all done in Assembly, millions of lines. They would finish one version and begin with a new version; the simple goal was to make the whole thing run two seconds faster. I guess they had nothing better to do.
On the other end of the spectrum, remember when you went to a foreign country like Mexico, you just bought a ticket and brought your passport? So, the gf and I are going to Cancun for five days. We've spent as many days filling out web pages with two governments, a hotel and an airline for the privilege of travel, many times the pages dropped and lost all the entry, or they would get stuck in a field that just wouldn't allow the appropriate entry. Mexican immigration alone wanted no less than nine .jpg files of various personal and travel itinerary images in addition to the dozens of data fields.
Your lottery numbers for today are 1201. This is the error that kept popping up on the AJC computer as Apollo landed. The computer actually did fail, and it failed unexpectedly, for they didn't know what the error really meant. It wasn't in the book. It wasn't in the checklist. They had to look it up.
Well, it really saved that mission was the. hands and skill of Neil Armstrong, who was able to land it in spite of that problem. However, he also couldn't have done that without the. without the computer getting in there in the first place
Bill Carver
@Reply 7 months ago
One great thing that. I see when. Richard is making videos here. Even the free ones as he's pays attention to design. I didn't like Microsoft access years ago, not because that was. because that was not capable, but because it was ugly. I mean, the databases people were designing. were designed by people that the most they painted with is crayons with No. artistic or layout knowledge whatsoever. Now not that artistic and layout knowledge is important. because I'm sure that Richard has never actually studied the esthetics of building a page or a form. But he just knows it from 30 years experience and he takes the time to make his databases look good.. Steve Jobs designed Mac OS10. The very first version and when talking about it mentioned that he wanted to make O. S-10 look so good that you would want to lick it. This is something that we should all put into our database. It's to make them lickable. Yes, they need to be functional, but they can't be ugly. So take the time to align those forms and make the sizes correct and give it a good esthetic that looks organized and pleasing to the eye.
Thanks, I appreciate that. Yeah, I've definitely seen my fair share of databases that are loud and proud - colors everywhere, fonts all over the place - and others that are so plain you might as well be staring at a raw Excel sheet. I try to find a happy medium. Nothing too flashy, but still easy on the eyes.
I like to keep things consistent - if I'm using blue, I'll stick with different shades of blue. Maybe a dark blue background, white text, and lighter blue for input fields. Just little touches like that to make it look polished without being distracting.
I've actually done whole videos on form aesthetics. Never studied design formally, but after 30 years of building forms, you get a feel for what works. Just don't ask my wife - she still thinks I can't dress myself.
Thomas Gonder
@Reply 7 months ago
Three people got the image, at least. Even if the movie itself was ridiculous. Design was easy when you only had 80 columns (130 for the band printer). The color part, nonexistent. You could add italic, bold, reverse and underline to one screen font and that was about it.
Too many fonts and too little or too much white space is as distracting on a computer's screen as it was on paper. Further, I reviewed my older son's history textbook some fifteen years ago and was horrified to see it organized like a schizophrenic's conspiracy wall. The kind you see in shows with photos, highlighted text, call-out boxes and string strung all over the place.
For some things, I long for the days when more was better than less. My cracked patella can attest to that thanks to an AeroMexico flight attendant crashing her food cart into my left knee yesterday on a return flight from Cancun in which myself and about two dozen other passengers couldn't fit in the miserly seat spacing. That's the long, painful story made short.
It may not be great, but I can dress myself better than my mom did. I look at those old photos and wonder what the hell was she thinking?
Thomas ouch! Sounds painful. I hate those beverage carts.
Want to talk about a mom dressing you? Here's what my grandma (who raised me, so she was basically my mom) used to dress me like. I just found some old photos in my storage unit and came across this little gem... I was probably 10 here...
Richard Okay, my mom was a saint buying me only plaid shorts.
Stanley Mc Keown
@Reply 7 months ago
On two weeks holiday with my 52 year old VW bus -- lost count of the number of modern cars I've passed stopped at the side of the road with bonnets aloft -- heads being scratched. It's little wonder why these simple German cars went on so long.
Matt Hall
@Reply 7 months ago
My mom's addictions were sweaters and corduroy.
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