system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: what exactly did the early NASA computers, the types used in the Apollo missions, do? How did 32k of processing power actually 'send a rocket to the moon'?
gpt
It doesn't take much processing power to launch a rocket to the moon. The difficulty was the reliability of parts, not how fast it can compute.

The early computers are essentially just large calculators with built in course calculation programs in them.