From Dave Holtum, Bath, UK
Richard Webb’s comment that “Apollo missions were launched on little more computing power than is found inside a smartphone” somewhat underestimates progress in computing speed since 1969 (18 May, p 25). Smartphones are more than 100 million times faster than an IBM 360 mainframe, which was probably the fastest computer that NASA had. Apollo engineers wouldn’t even have dreamed of such computing power.
