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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 re…

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…

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 …

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' DT…

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/19990…

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 clari…

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 advant…

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 writte…

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, S…

> 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 Englis…

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 disappoint…

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 an…

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…

@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 run…

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 sy…

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…

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 goo…

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…

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 …

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 dou…

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 Voya…

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 ro…

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…

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…

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.