businesstravelerusa.com SEPTEMBER 20195WELCOME
S
ummer is in the rear view mirror and September is upon us. We look
back on the few fleeting weeks just past and think about our experienc-
es – family travels, fun activities, special occasions. But even as we say
goodbye to the long, hot days and hit-or-miss schedules, we welcome a
more predictable, if no less frenetic routine that comes with fall.
While summer nostalgia tends to center around very personal mem-
ories of family and friends, one story that seemed to dominate this July
was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. It’s a
worldwide memory in the collective consciousness, when on July 20, 1969, Neil
Armstrong became the first person to set foot on another celestial body beyond
our own. He and fellow Astronaut Buzz Aldrin were also the first travelers on
what is arguably the longest long-haul flight to a single destination in history.
However more than a moment of triumph one summer a half century ago,
Apollo and its progeny in space have inescapably altered life on this planet.
Everything from CAT scans to Speedo swimsuits were somehow birthed out of
the race to put human beings on the moon. Big data and the supercomputers to
manage it, satellite television, ear thermometers and invisible braces, all came out
of the space program. And the list goes on.
Of course, the highest-profile developments have come from Silicon Valley,
which owes much of its existence to the now-ancient integrated circuits that pro-
vided the computing power behind Apollo. The descendants of those first silicon
wafers have grown up (or shrunk down) to become today’s super-fast, super-cheap
microchips.
We’ve all heard the mantra: You have more computing power in your smart-
phone than the computer on Apollo 11. And it’s true – the Apollo Guidance
Computer had a staggering 2k of internal memory. By comparison, take a look at
the computers we review this month in Laptops: Light Touch, (page 24); 8GB of
RAM is pretty much table stakes for this technolog y today. But that’s four million
times more memory than what Armstrong and Aldrin had to work with.
However I would submit there’s a vast difference between power and impact.
While your laptop may be millions of times more powerful, it is certainly not
more important than that Apollo 11 computer. The technolog y that took humans
to the moon has set the course for the world we navigate today.
It’s a great gift we’ve been given – let us endeavor to use it wisely. BT^Dan Booth Editorial DirectorBusiness Traveler® North America is published ten times a
year at our address as above. The magazine is independent of
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sarily those of the publishers who cannot accept responsibili-
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be accepted for publication. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part of the text, photographs or illustrations
without permission is prohibited.Managing Director Jerry Ruud – (973) 985-
[email protected]Group Publisher Jerry Allison – (973) 839-
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