3/02    My officemate is trying to convince me that the Apollo program
        to go to the moon gave a tremendous push to computer technology.
        Is this true?
        \_ Of course it's true.  In fact, the OCF used to run entirely on
           Apollo workstations, which were (as you can probably guess from the
           name) direct lineal descendants of the powerful desktop mission
           control workstations developed for the unprecedented computing
           demands of the moon mission.  Apollo Computer was a public
           corporation run by NASA as a technology-transfer testbed until the
           late 1980s, when the Bush Administration privatized the company
           and sold it to H-P as a deficit reduction measure.  -- kahogan
                \_ the older versions of the apollo os & manuals had a cool
                   logo featuring the planet Saturn (similar to the NASA logo)
                   until they got replaced with the boring "Apollo, a
                   subsidiary of HP" logos (except of course for the OCF
                   where the HP boot logos got replaced with all sorts of
                   silliness) -alanc-
                \_ Apollo is widely regarded as the first company to
                   sell workstations & the inventor of the workstation market,
                   which they dominated for years until Sun finally caught up.
                   \_ Wait... so those Apollos weren't running OS/2 afterall?
                \_ Apollo was the first company to sell workstations and
                   basically created the workstation market, which they
                   dominated for years until Sun finally caught up.
                   \_ Oh, I once thought Sun was the first.  Never mind.
                        \_ Sun was the first UNIX workstation.  Apollo used
                                their own multics-based OS at first and added
                                a UNIX layer to it after they started losing
                                sales to Sun.
           \_ The Apollo DN4500 had a secret hidden switch (activated by a
              special key which could only be legally posessed by NASA
              employees and members of the UN "black helicopter" multinational
              response team) that, when flipped, upped its processing power to
              approximately that of a Cray Y-XMP.  Pretty snappy for a 1980s
              desktop machine.
                \_ The real reason Soda Mk I died was a booby trap set to
                   destroy the motherboard triggered when CSUA'ers decided
                   to try and activate this switch.
        \_ The government poured billions into the Apollo program not just
           so we could get stupid pride over "beating the russians" but to
           help finance major improvements in all sorts of technologies.
           \_ Little does the public know about the truth behind the "Space
              Race"... in fact, the United States waged war in space
              against the Russians until the late '70s when the 19th
              Stellar Fleet and the Russian 4th Fleet were destroyed by
              some unknown force.
              \_ Mojo Riser?
                \_ Tom is a patriot.  He was on the ground out of rotation
                   when the 19th was burned from the skies around Io.  Now
                   commander of the 32nd, Tom is burning both Russians and
                   the Alien Menace from space on a daily basis.  Quoted
                   recently in Space Marines (issue 5, vol 3), Tom says,
                   "We're going to doosh those bastards til there's nothing
                   left to doosh and then we're going to doosh 'em some more!
                   SB+25 at Rom!"  -tom #1 Fan