Going Public - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 95

Fig. 6.1. Generalized development model
by Rockwell Collins. (Courtesy Rockwell
Collins)
Fig. 6.2. ti 4100
and antenna by
Texas Instruments.
(Courtesy Texas
Instruments)
receivers and computing have come. The ti ppc offered 256 kilobytes of ran-
dom access memory (ram) and a irst-generation Intel 8087 math coproces-
sor, designed to boost the 8086 central processing unit (cpu), which had a
clock-speed rating of five megahertz (five million cycles per second). 53 This
was the cpu that begat computers bearing the 286, 386, 486, and finally Pen-
tium trademarks. At more than twenty-six pounds, this box and keyboard
combo with a nine-inch screen was far from the portability of a laptop com-
puter. Uploading programs and storing information depended on ive-and-a-
quarter-inch floppy disks. The list price was about $3,000. By comparison, the
most expensive smartphones today cost no more than $700, typically have
512 megabytes of ram—about two thousand times as much computing space—
and have cpus running a billion cycles per second. They wirelessly connect
with the Internet to retrieve and display tabular charts like those Satplan
created—all while a gps receiver built on an integrated semiconductor chip
small enough to fit into a wristwatch runs unobtrusively in the background,