author: Artur Niedoba
Most Powerful Computers in History of Mankind That Were Weaker Than Your Laptop
Probably everyone has heard that the power of the computers used in the Apollo 11 mission was weaker than of today's calculators. Today, we look at the most powerful computers in history and how they compare to what we've grown accustomed to.
Table of Contents
- Most Powerful Computers in History of Mankind That Were Weaker Than Your Laptop
- Colossus project – glory of cryptography
- Deep Blue IBM – chess like no other
- Digital Jurassic Park
- The stuff Toy Story was made of
- To the Moon... with 4 KB of memory
The stuff Toy Story was made of
Since we have already entered the world of movies, let's stay here for a while. Less than two and a half years after witnessing digital dinosaurs, the world has received another production that became another breakthrough in digital cinema. On November 19, 1995, Toy Story animation debuted, proving that computers could not only make enhance movies with special effects – they could also be used to create an entire movie. How important this animation turned out to be is best illustrated by the current position of Pixar studios.
A cluster of one hundred and seventeen SPARCstation 20 stations (87 dual-processor and 30 four-processor, 100 MHz), with 192-384 megabytes of RAM and 4-5 GB of disk space each, was used to create the first part of the adventures of Lean and Woody.
This doesn't seem like a stellar machine today, but it propelled Pixar into making subsequent installments, and each of their animations was rendered on better hardware and in shorter time than the original. Just compare the quality of the first and the last movie in the franchise to see how much has changed in popular animations during this time.