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Article: How second man on the moon crashed down to Earth; Buzz Aldrin's book, Magnificent Desolation: The long journey home from the moon, tells of a man whose achievements in later life never eclipsed the one small step he took for mankind, writes Sam Leith.(News)
- Article from:
- Pretoria News (South Africa)
- Article date:
- July 20, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Independent News & Media PLC. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE COMPUTER on which I'm writing this review has a 500GB hard disk and a 2.33GHz quad-core processor. The computers which, in 1969, sent three astronauts safely to the moon and back had 74KB of memory and processors with a clock speed of 2.048MHz.
There are two conclusions I draw from this. The first is that the bloke in customer services at Dell may have got away with selling me something a little overspecified for my requirements.
The second is that Buzz Aldrin and his fellow Apollo astronauts - travelling into outer space with the sort of technology that now would seem low-spec for a digital watch - had cojones like freakin' coconuts.
As ...