When the United States set its sights on the moon in the early 1960s, the world didn't think it was possible. We were barely able to get a hunk of metal off the ground and into space, let alone a crew of brave human beings. Who could blame them, anyway? The technology was so laughable compared to now that your phone holds almost infinitely more data than the entire Apollo spacecrafts.
The memory module in the ships' computer is built with a lugnut-sized, donut-shaped magnetic core, which is placed into a module. The entire holder is filled with these tiny magnetic cores, which are then wired up with a needle that holds up to 20 feet of wire. A machine lines up with the correct core so that an operator could pass the wire through without error.
A single module can contain over 512 cores and over half a mile of wire. Each of these brick-sized modules could hold 65,000 bits of information. Sound like a lot? To put that in more modern computer terms: That's merely 65kB of storage, compared to the typical 20GB (20,971,520kB) on a single phone today
