10 Secrets Behind Alien's Nostromo Ship You Didn't Know
6. "MOTHER" Had A 2.1 Terabyte AI Mainframe
The Nostromo was of course controlled by the mainframe computer MU/TH/UR 6000, better known as "Mother."
Mother was in charge of maintaining the ship's day-to-day operations, such as auto-piloting it while the crew were in hyper-sleep, and more nefariously collaborating with android Ash (Ian Holm) to help ensure the safe transport of the Xenomorph.
Official documentation states that Mother's mainframe touts a whopping 2.1TB of RAM, which given that around 16GB of RAM is recommended for your average gaming PC today, represents a memory input more than 130x the current standard.
Considering that sci-fi is historically poor at tracking real-life technological progress - never forget Blade Runner's flying cars in 2019 - it's comparatively realistic that, 100 years from now, a ship's computer would have just over 2TB of RAM.
And even if Ridley Scott turns out to have underestimated RAM's progression in the decades to come, there's always the excuse that the Nostromo is a junky space truck that never would've been outfitted with truly state-of-the-art computing tech anyway.