I just want to give kudos to the engineers who are working with fifty-year-old software to reprogram entirely a spacecraft that’s nearly a light-day away. Holy shit.
Imagine the xkcd meme but instead of waiting on compilation, you’re waiting for the speed of light!
¿Por qué no los dos?
Well, the tech behind the computer suggests the lack of a compiler, for one thing. I’d doubt very much that there’s even an assembler.
Wasn’t a lot of Voyager’s code written in C?
It was being built before or just shortly around the time that C was being made.
Per sources found on Hacker News:
“The spacecrafts’ original control and analysis software was written in Fortran 5 (later ported to Fortran 77). Some of the software is still in Fortran, though other pieces have now been ported to the somewhat more modern C.”
There’s good discussion about it here also that may indicate that this is the ground software and was written in Fortran V, not Fortran 5. To my mind though, C was still far too new at the time for it to be the smart choice here, and I’d assume custom assembly along the lines of what was needed for the AGC is needed here.
TIL. I thought C was older than that.
Modern earth-based phones often don’t last more than a few years, then there’s gigachad 1970s tech floating in interstellar space still chooching.
Yeah, I mean it’s basically running on a toaster. Crazy how much radiation the Voyager probes have to have sustained.
