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

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

#21
post #20

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).

Still amazed how much fun it is to play a 36KB Stargate Defender!

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

#22
post #20

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).

My first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".

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

#25

Very depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of RAM" post.

Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.

There's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-readable information on any given page.

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

#26

Very depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of RAM" post.

Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.

Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed.

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

#27
post #20

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).

Welcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not have more resources that that. Even as completely new development (of pool control system or electricity meter).

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

#28

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 i…

Duh its space you have to use Turbo pascal

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

#29
Nice. I’ve done some of my best learning by trying to do things with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right resource scope. Ie. “No, stop optimizing these enums as integers instead of strings… this isn’t the game boy emulator this is a web browser. It’s fine.”
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