this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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[–] stoly 28 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Plastic_Ramses 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ive never heard of ROM, what is it?

[–] HootinNHollerin 7 points 5 months ago

Read only memory

[–] CptEnder 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 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.

[–] Regrettable_incident 1 points 5 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.