- cross-posted to:
- crumbgrabber@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- crumbgrabber@lemm.ee
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To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.
Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That’s about 10x as much power as a cell phone’s radio, but it’s still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it’s extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it’s still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It’s being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they’re still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they’re decoding a signal that’s 10^-18 watts.
So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you’re doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.
The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you’d probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn’t do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.
So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.
And you explained all of that WITHOUT THE OBNOXIOUS GODDAMNS and FUCKIN SCIENCE AMIRITEs
Oh screw that, that’s an emotional post from somebody sharing their reaction, and I’m fucking STOKED to hear about it, can’t believe I missed the news!
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.
Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.
Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.
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.
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.
IBM is 100, but the Internet didn’t exist in 1924, so we’ll say the clock starts in 1989. I’m pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.
What does IBM even do anymore? I’m guessing they just support all of their legacy products that customers are locked into.
It’s basically an investment fund that runs the companies it invests in, like Alphabet, but with a bigger mix of real estate and finance investments thrown in.
What’s a company they invest in?
Themselves. I’m just saying internally they run it like an investment fund. Example: https://medium.com/design-ibm/area-631-what-i-learned-in-ibms-start-up-and-innovation-program-d87ed98f9549
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”.
They also released the source code of the Apollo 11 guidance computer. So if you want to fly to the moon, here is one part of how to do it.
Nice, now I just need a rocket and launchpad! Craigslist?
Commission one on fiverr or etsy.
Still faster than the average Windows update.
NASA should be in charge of Windows updates!
