The Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, had lost contact with Earth last fall. But it is now back on line. The broken computer chip could not be replaced so NASA engineers had to do a work around. From 18 billion miles away. On a system built with 1970s technology. Because Voyager is 22 light hours away, it took two days to confirm it was back on line; 22 hours for signal from Earth to reach Voyager and another 22 hours to receive the reply.
It’s so cool and impressive what they did (literally patching the codebase which was written in FORTRAN 77 to avoid the damaged block of RAM on the chip)… I love Voyager (we’re about the same age) and have been following it all my life. I’m so glad they are working so hard to keep them going.
I remember these days of having to deal directly with addresses in memory. A long long time ago we had a piece of assembly language code that supported one of our products that had to deal with supporting the video display. We used to give it to any new programmer that joined the company on an early 8086/8088 chip because it was, well, crap. One day one of my programmer called me to show me a bug. He showed me that a piece of code did not work, but if he added a Jump X: where all X: did was return, it worked. Apparently, it was a bug in the CPU that if the code was on a page boundary, it would fail and that nonsense fixed it. All the jump / return did was move the code to sit outside of the page boundary and the CPU behaved as expected... Ah, the good ol' days were not that great when it came to software. But, impressive that NASA was able to do that after all these years from so far away. That story made me sad realizing how old I am...
