This is off topic for this post, but astronomy, space and space missions always have a way of putting things in perspective and showing how much humans have progressed and learned, and also the magnitude of human achievement (in the past) with what seem like completely unusable equipment today.
I look at the Voyager (1 and 2) data whenever I feel like comparing things to what we have today, and I always end up being overwhelmed by the facts, figures and what humans have achieved. I can't help but be awed.
Quoting from the Voyager FAQ [1]:
> Question: How fast are the Voyager computers?
> Answer:Not very fast compared to today’s standards. The master clock runs at 4 MHz but the CPU’s clock runs at only 250 KHz. A typical instruction takes 80 microseconds, that is about 8,000 instructions per second. To put this in perspective, a 2013 top-of-the-line smartphone runs at 1.5 GHz with four or more processors yielding over 14 billion instructions per second.
Quoting from the Voyager Interstellar Science page [2]:
> Science data are returned to earth in real time at 160 bps.
Just imagine sending data to earth at 160 bps from a distance of 20 billion kilometers and 17 billion kilometers^ [3] , respectively, for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The time it takes light to travel between earth and Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is currently about 19 hours and 15.5 hours^, respectively. (Some other communication is collected and sent at 115 kbps)
^: These figures are rounded since it doesn't make a huge difference to me at this magnitude, and also, the distance from earth to these two spacecraft does sometimes decrease due to earth's revolution around the sun.
[1]: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html
[2]: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/
[3]: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/