this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] FlatFootFox@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

[–] xantoxis@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.

[–] Artyom@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago

It's not Slack's fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they're set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.

All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn't have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

IBM is 100, but the Internet didn't exist in 1924, so we'll say the clock starts in 1989. I'm pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What does IBM even do anymore? I’m guessing they just support all of their legacy products that customers are locked into.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's basically an investment fund that runs the companies it invests in, like Alphabet, but with a bigger mix of real estate and finance investments thrown in.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What’s a company they invest in?

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 0 points 6 months ago

Themselves. I'm just saying internally they run it like an investment fund. Example: https://medium.com/design-ibm/area-631-what-i-learned-in-ibms-start-up-and-innovation-program-d87ed98f9549

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

They don't use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

That means "written in assembly" means "written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn't document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke".

[–] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They also released the source code of the Apollo 11 guidance computer. So if you want to fly to the moon, here is one part of how to do it.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Nice, now I just need a rocket and launchpad! Craigslist?

[–] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 months ago

Commission one on fiverr or etsy.