mek6800d2

13 ms·

1.
by mek6800d2 11d ago
Those interested in more information about Voyager's DTR should check out a discussion on the Space Exploration Stack Exchange, "How was magnetic tape decay prevented in Voyager 1?", https://space.stackexchange.com
2.
by mek6800d2 1mo ago
The FDS CPU is very RISCy in nature, but it actually has close to 40 instructions! https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=9476.msg26... And it has been compared to the PDP-8 like rahen suggests, although the Voy
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by mek6800d2 1mo ago
They didn't get access to the actual NASA software running in space. They wrote simple example programs to exercise the CPU emulator. The example program that is loaded when you first visit the web page simply counts down from 10. An
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by mek6800d2 1mo ago
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are identical, as are their computers. JPL's Voyager documentation is the property of Caltech, not NASA, and are thus not available via FOIA. People have gotten copies of selected documentation by requesting t
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by mek6800d2 5mo ago
The 2025 YouTube video is "How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away" by David Cummings of JPL. There is a Vimeo video of the Voyager team reacting when data first began trickling in from Voy
6.
by mek6800d2 5mo ago
For others, this truly excellent 2016 paper is "Voyager Interstellar Mission: Challenges of Flying a Very Old Spacecraft on a Very Long Mission" by Sun Kang Matsumoto. She was/is a Voyager Fault Protection and CCS Flight Sof
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by mek6800d2 6mo ago
Thanks for the excerpt. I read a couple of Sagan's other books many years ago and I really should read APBD sometime. Interesting to me, Sagan's "little puff of gas" was borne out in the paper I referenced (not that Sag
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by mek6800d2 6mo ago
I enjoyed your video and it is well done. Unfortunately, I don't think it's true. The Voyager tape drives were similar (if not largely identical) to the earlier Viking Orbiters' DTRs. The Voyager engineers were certainly f
9.
by mek6800d2 10mo ago
I still remember a very interesting article about him in the Electronic Engineering Times back in 1998: "Boston's Scholz Engineers a Rock Dynasty" https://web.archive.org/web/19990224204558/http:&#
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by mek6800d2 11mo ago
Clickbait! If you read the article, there's no gloom or doom. 30 or more years ago (?), Consumer Reports did a report on toothbrushes and they did a follow-up note or article clarifying their recommendation of how often to change to
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by mek6800d2 11mo ago
The Galileo hack was indeed incredible. From a post-mission paper: "Although the primary mission was completed in December 1997, the mission was extended three times to take advantage of the spacecraft's durability with 24 more o
12.
by mek6800d2 11mo ago
With great respect to Doug McIlroy (in the CACM article), the shell pipeline has a serious problem that Knuth's Pascal program doesn't have. (I'm assuming Knuth's program is written in standard Pascal.) You could have c
13.
by mek6800d2 1y ago
A reminder to everyone: Social Security is NOT a retirement plan, it is an insurance plan. When your 401(k) is cratered by the stock market or your pension goes the way of Enron, SS is supposed to be there to hopefully keep you from bein
14.
by mek6800d2 1y ago
> Not understanding English from the early 1800's ... I can sometimes more easily understand written Greek, Spanish or French (I don't speak any of those languages) than old English. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice , wr
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by mek6800d2 1y ago
That's the way it was decades ago. In the mid-1980s, a headhunter cold-called me at work and asked what I did. I answered, "I'm a computer programmer." Sounding severely disappointed, he said, "Oh ... Is there an
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by mek6800d2 1y ago
This Substack article should not be trusted - there are no sources given. I google'd each of the 4 example satellites and "netbsd" and the only results were the Substack article and people referencing the article. NetBSD ma
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by mek6800d2 1y ago
I came to post the same link earlier. My mind is kind of slow these days and it wasn't until a few hours later that I made the connection with your username. I am not worthy!!! --a long-time reader
18.
by mek6800d2 1y ago
@kens beat me to it-I too was going to suggest Ken Shirriff's "Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack". The page has a Sinclair Scientific emulator that displays the running, underlying calculator chip instru
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by mek6800d2 1y ago
Just to be clear, the computers onboard the spacecraft are programmed in assembly language--3 types of computers on each spacecraft, so 3 assembly languages. The original ground system was mostly written in Fortran. Mission control (i.e.,
20.
by mek6800d2 1y ago
70-meter dish antennas are needed to transmit to Voyager and there is one 70-m dish at each of the 3 DSN stations in California, Spain, and Australia. The Australian station is the only one that can see Voyager 2 and because of the Earth&#
21.
by mek6800d2 1y ago
I recently started reading Peter Westwick's 2007 book, Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004 . I've only gotten up into the 1980s so far and I find it a good read. Leadership? Sausage making. Per West
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by mek6800d2 1y ago
46 hours ... if you're lucky! :) 23 hours for a command to reach the spacecraft and 23 hours more for the spacecraft's response to reach Earth. If you're lucky: the Voyager project has to compete with other projects for ante
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by mek6800d2 1y ago
Part of this excellent movie revolved around the months-long shutdown of the 70-meter antenna at the Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. Coincidentally, the new JPL press release about Voyager 1's thrusters also details
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by mek6800d2 2y ago
You're porting in the WRONG direction. The existing COBOL code is undoubtedly using system utilities such as database management systems, etc. on the mainframe computers. And I doubt that you've written Python code that smooth
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by mek6800d2 2y ago
Thank you! Perhaps like you trying to get the source code, I was frustrated at the lack of information and began writing a letter seeking more information to Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager. I couldn't find an address to se
26.
by mek6800d2 2y ago
Dusty Decks? First thing that popped into my head when I saw your name. I bookmarked it on one of my web pages back in 2004. Dang, between that and your other works, a computing rock star in our midst! Dusty Decks: Preserving historic so
27.
by mek6800d2 2y ago
Wow! Thank you! I had dropped out of school, got interested in computers, and returned part-time in 1978, eventually getting my degree in 1981. Although I used the Univacs, I never actually saw them! In 1980-1981, I worked as an undergr
28.
by mek6800d2 2y ago
Author here--thanks for the compliment! I too had never heard of Fortran 5, which is why it kept bugging me every time I heard it mentioned in connection with Voyager over the past few years.
29.
by mek6800d2 2y ago
Data General's compiler was "Fortran 5", not V. Univac and Control Data Corporation had their own Fortran Vs, but there was no relation between the two.
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by mek6800d2 2y ago
I too thought this way and I figured there were probably a lot of engineers who were comfortably well-off and would be happy to relocate and work for free on Voyager. However, although there would be great emotional satisfaction working on

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