Hold all the ‘V’Ger’ jokes to the end – this is retrofuturism now – fixing Voyager from fifteen billion miles away. Check out this ~1 hr breakdown on the technical challenges of fixing a 50 year old computer – any command takes 22.3 hours to send and another 22.3 hours to receive. Gives new meaning to Spock’s line in Star Trek: The Motion Picture: ” A simple binary codetransmitted by carrier wave signal. Radio.” I thought my old 2400 bps modem was bad. Watch the clip and then let’s discuss:
Comments from HackerNews helps give the achievement more context: “Writing an assembler for a bespoke CPU is one thing, many of us have done it as a toy project, but stakes are a bit different here. You’d have to mathematically prove your assembler and disassembler are absolutely 100% correct. When your only working model is utterly irreplaceable and irrecoverable upon error, it probably takes a lot more resources to develop.” – mystified5016
And then: “I think what fascinates me the most about all of this is how there are wide gaps in how much design and engineering documentation from that time period has survived to present day. For a long time, I just assumed that NASA owned and archived every design spec, revision, research paper, memo and napkin doodle related to their public-facing missions. I learned recently that even a lot of the original Gemini and Apollo program code (let alone source code) and docs are apparently gone forever.” – bityard
