You'd think that HBers would give up on the computer issue, given that people have written
emulators for the onboard computer. If you don't believe it worked, you can now try it for yourself.
It is interesting that NASA has gone to a fairly standard realtime OS (VXWorks) for its modern missions; CPU power on spacecraft has finally caught up with general purpose programming requirements. In general this should lead to fewer bugs and cheaper software development, but the complexity has gone up a lot; the embarrassing Flash driver reboot bug on the Mars rovers is a classic example.
As a side note, my father won a special award from NASA back in high school for his science fair project (he was looking at temperature effects on timing in transistor flip-flop circuits). The prize was cool—large full color prints of Saturn (not sure which model off hand) rockets and Apollo hardware. I found them in a closet a few months back, to my delight. They are now decorating my pool table room.