Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

For those unaware (spoiler follows) this is the reveal in the plot of 'Star Trek - The Motion Picture'.

Here's a photo of the tape recorder:

https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...

but can it play Doom?

Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"

> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.

> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.

The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

I’ve been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time, and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb (Genesis).