• @[email protected]
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    705 months ago

    Respect to the computer scientist who sorted that out. That has got to be an extremely satisfying bug to fix.

    • tabris
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      335 months ago

      As a software engineer, I’m still trying to figure out their build pipeline. That thing has got to be interesting.

      • @stoly
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        285 months ago

        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.

        • palordrolap
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          185 months ago

          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.

          • @Regrettable_incident
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            15 months ago

            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.

          • @CptEnder
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            5 months ago

            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.