Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
A good example is Robert Heinlein's "Starman Jones". Intergalactic space travel is accomplished with the use of Log Tables and Analog Computers.
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Do you have any idea what technology the first soviet manned spaceflight used? Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth on 12 April 1961. That was looooong before the existence of the first portable electronic computer.
Yuri Gagarin operated some equipment by *pulling strings!*
I think, even during the Soyuz-Apollo text flight (the first joint flight of the U.S. and Soviet space programs) ((see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project )) the astronauts used HP calculator to compute the ideal trajectory - the one that used "light pen" (also called Wand) to read program stored in a book in the form of barcodes.
see
http://www.hpmuseum.org/prog/hp41prog.htm