Re: Furby: todays' Apple II?

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

brian.hammack@rook.wa.com (Brian Hammack) wrote:

>CRC(| Furby has four times the computer processing power and 30 times
>     | the computer memory than the Apollo lunar landing module that
>     | put Americans on the moon, according to Michael Hawley,
>     | professor of media technology at Massachusetts Institute of
>     | Technology.
>
>Can we send the Furbys to the moon, in that case??  Please??

The thing about space is that advanced CPUs like the
Pentium or the PowerPC are no-no.  If the circuitry is
too small (and they get smaller as designers make
chips faster), solar radiation has an easier time "flipping
switches" in the chip, changing 1s to 0s and vice versa
and thus crashing CPUs.  For years, NASA and the
Russians have been using older computers that, while
less powerful, could do the job and remain relatively
immune to these problems.  It is when they try to use
relatively "new" stuff that things get hairy.  The
International Space Station, for example, will use
primarily the "new" '386 CPUs and they have to make
sure things are better shielded, etc.