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Voyager 1 returning science data again
(spacenews.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Respect to the computer scientist who sorted that out. That has got to be an extremely satisfying bug to fix.
As a software engineer, I'm still trying to figure out their build pipeline. That thing has got to be interesting.
No documentation, imagine! The original designers--dead. This person had to reverse engineer every aspect of that system, though I can't imagine that it has more than, say, 64KB of RAM. Still an enormous amount of work but not like trying to figure out how an iPhone works without any documentation.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/
According to the above, the software was written in FORTRAN.
There's probably at least one warehouse somewhere full of green bar sprocketed teletype / dot matrix paper with the source code on it, if not also magnetic tapes. And that assumes they haven't archived it in other places and formats in the last ~50 years.
70kB though. That's a huge amount of memory for 1977. Low-end personal computers were still selling with less than that 10 years later.
That said, the article doesn't distinguish ROM and RAM, so I wonder how much of that is ROM. ROM is and was far cheaper.
Also, that 70 might be a rounding up of 65536 bytes, which is 64k, so you might be spot on with your guess there.
Ive never heard of ROM, what is it?
Read only memory
Ha my sister had to learn FORTRAN for her research science work. Lot of long-term, old survey tools use it still. Apparently it was... not a pleasant experience to learn the language haha.
Yeah, I had a Sinclair spectrum with 48k ram. Later on I had a BBC B computer that iirc had 32k. It was actually a pretty powerful machine, you could do a lot with it.