Trivia / The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

• Technology Marches On: Mike's processing power, when drawing on the entire computer network of Luna, is portrayed as almost inconceivably fast. Mannie is amazed that Mike can create and animate a lifelike computer graphics representation of himself, saying that such a feat would require millions of calculations per second — in supercomputing terminology, multiple megaflops (FLoating-point OPerations per Second). The first supercomputer capable of more than one megaflop was the CDC 7600, which was completed in 1968, two years after the novel's publication. That machine took up a large room; half a century later, hardware of equivalent power is so small you could swallow it without noticing it on the way down, and so insignificant that nobody would notice the loss. But we still have yet to achieve the sort of genuinely photorealistic, indistinguishable-from-human realtime animation Heinlein describes — we can do realtime animation, and we can do damn-near photorealistic animation, but not both at once, and we still can't quite do truly photorealistic animation at all. (Avatar might still be as close as we've come thus far, and the whole film took somewhere around a millennium of processor time to render.) Part of the problem of reaching photorealistic animation is that our visual medium keeps getting better. Photorealistic might have been easier to achieve if television quality stopped improving in the 60's. Grainy, low-res, limited color would be much easier to fake on the fly than million-pixel resolution HD content. It's just another aspect of Zeerust, where a technological revolution wasn't foreseen (in this case the advancement of TV past tubes). Early in the book, Man asks Mike if he has an empty memory bank he can lock off from everyone else, Mike happily says he has one with "Ten-to-the-eighth-bits capacity." This is only 12.5 megabytes. Impressive for the era it was written, but dwarfed by the average YouTube video today.

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