this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Science Memes

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Voyager 1 (mander.xyz)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

It's not Slack's fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they're set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.

All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn't have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

They don't use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

That means "written in assembly" means "written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn't document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke".