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1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2019 17:36:41 EDT Nate Cull

   http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html

   <<We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer. Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Trying to mine Bitcoin on this 1960s computer seemed both pointless and anachronistic, so I had to give it a shot. ... Unfortunately, the computer is so slow that it would take about a billion times the age of the universe to successfully mine a Bitcoin block. >>

   1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2019 17:37:37 EDT Nate Cull

      in reply to

      The moral of this story appears to be:

      raw compute power has darn near zero correlation with the ability to do useful things for society.

      1. Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 08-Jul-2019 17:40:20 EDT Nate Cull

         in reply to

         this part is pretty cool though: the 1960s Apollo Guidance Computer interactive debugging environment. yep, they had one!

         << A core rope simulator allowed a program to be fed into the AGC from external storage. This simulator was part of the refrigerator-sized monitor (below), which provided a debugging interface to the AGC through a test connector on the AGC. The monitor allowed programmers to set breakpoints, single-step, examine registers, and so forth, using lights and switches. >>