OOPS! Little green men in interstellar space?

[grober]

NASA loses contact with Voyager 2 | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Voyager 2's antenna was nudged of course, preventing it from making contact with Earth. The spacecraft is currently 19.9 billion kilometres away.

www.skyatnightmagazine.com

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

Sat Navs and radios were such rubbish five decades ago when we sent Voyager 2 off on its little trip.

 

[grober]

Sat Navs and radios were such rubbish five decades ago when we sent Voyager 2 off on its little trip.

State of the art at the time----some very clever software with primitive hardware by todays standards.

 

[grober]

Contact of sorts re-established Voyager 2: Nasa picks up 'heartbeat' signal after sending wrong command

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

State of the art at the time----some very clever software with primitive hardware by todays standards.

This was "my" state of the art in 1974.

A fully air conditioned, anti-static, machine room IBM 370/168, with a gobsmacking EIGHT Megabytes of online storage, said to be the fanciest computer in Hampshire at the time.

I tried to explain it to my Apple watch (32 Gigabyte, plus 1mb RAM) but it just laughed

It's astonishing what they've achieved with 1972's Voyager 2, which is 20 billion kms away.

 

[markjay]

This was "my" state of the art in 1974.

A fully air conditioned, anti-static, machine room IBM 370/168, with a gobsmacking EIGHT Megabytes of online storage, said to be the fanciest computer in Hampshire at the time.

I tried to explain it to my Apple watch (32 Gigabyte, plus 1mb RAM) but it just laughed

It's astonishing what they've achieved with 1972's Voyager 2, which is 20 billion kms away.

View attachment 144168

I learnt programming on the IBM System 360.... Fortran. Used punch cards - interactive teletype terminal time was far too expensive to allow us to use it...

 

[Bobby Dazzler]

I learnt programming on the IBM System 360.... Fortran. Used punch cards - interactive teletype terminal time was far too expensive to allow us to use it...

I learned to programme using FORTRAN 77. Good times.

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

I learnt programming on the IBM System 360.... Fortran. Used punch cards - interactive teletype terminal time was far too expensive to allow us to use it...

I was lucky enough to be the first of the Hursley generation to swerve the IBM029. I worked alongside a very old (40?) guy who wrote Assembler on cards.

Fortran IV at Sixth Form, surprisingly, but only Assembler and PL/1 out in the real world on the big 8mb air conditioned machine.

 

[Chrishazle]

Computer room at Shell Centre London upstream building in the late 1970's (about 1977/78) was amazing, I worked a summer holiday there delivering mail, the computer centre took up 1 entire floor of the building, glass screened and security doored, no-one got in without clearance, even to deliver their mail it was a hatch in the glass screening!

 

[Swotty]

I learnt programming on the IBM System 360.... Fortran. Used punch cards - interactive teletype terminal time was far too expensive to allow us to use it...

FORTRAN and COBOL, as I recall ... but now not in much detail!

 

[fabes]

Bloatware and in efficient coding....

It's incredible what was accomplished with only a few 'k' back at the start

 

[Ted]

Right.
Well we ‘ad it tough.
I wrote a bootstrap program once.
In binary.

 

[ChrisEdu]

I can spell BOOBIES on a calculator!

 

[SpikyMikey]

I can spell BOOBIES on a calculator!

 

[Mactech]

Ancient software and primitive hardware it may have, but after 46 years hard at work in deep space? That is astonishing. What sort of hardware can compete with that sort of life cycle now?
They built 'em tough in them days....

 

[grober]

I learnt programming on the IBM System 360.... Fortran. Used punch cards - interactive teletype terminal time was far too expensive to allow us to use it...

The space shuttle used 5 derivatives of the AP-101 versions of the IBM 360----- such was the development time of the shuttle vehicle that its avionics computer tech was almost obselete [allbeit well proven] by its first flight

IBM System/4 Pi - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Ted]

^^ anyone notice that those chips are military spec? (54xx vs 74xx)?

 

[grober]

Semiconductors and National Defense: What Are the Stakes?
During the cold war the US restricted the export of computer hardware to the USSR to put a brake on its military development technology---which spawned a generation of Russian wizkid software writers who learned to achieve amazing results with the primitive hardware available-----echoes of which, some say are still to be heard in today's era of cyber warfare/ criminality!

 

[MikeInWimbledon]

The space shuttle used 5 derivatives of the AP-101 versions of the IBM 360----- such was the development time of the shuttle vehicle that its avionics computer tech was almost obselete [allbeit well proven] by its first flight

IBM System/4 Pi - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Exactly, to achieve 20 billion kms with 1972 technology, and no maintenance team nearby, is insane !

How many of these are running 50 years on, without maintenance? (Ignore mileage for the moment)

(If you've never ridden in one, blag your way in. They're not as impressive as they were in the 1970's but well worth a test drive)

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[chic0821]

I can spell BOOBIES on a calculator!

Does that enable them to contact Voyager