I was browsing SparkFun, one of my favorite hobby electronics sites, today and they had an interesting article on their front page discussing the computers used on the Apollo missions to the moon. Seems appropriate given the name of our game this year!
Anyway, they make the point that the moon landings were driven by a computer that is less powerful than an Atmel AVR (which is itself significantly less powerful than the old IFI system and obviously the new CRIO system). Pretty interesting to think that they could navigate themselves all the way to the moon on 36K of program memory and 2K of RAM. And if it crashed, well, that would have been bad news.
Here it is 40 years later and I'm still amazed by what those engineers accomplished with hardware that would be considered beyond primitive today. It was the pinnacle of ingenuity and innovation. Just think if someone gave you this year's FRC control system and told you to write software on it to control a huge rocket and steer itself all the way to the moon. Talk about a challenge!
Here's the article:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=248