This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
And they got further and accomplished more than all the AI companies, combined, have done [with the TiBs of data].
If we wanted to impress the aliens, we should have sent MiniDiscs, even if it meant delaying the mission a little while.
In 1977 69 KB was huge memory. First home PC's from 1980 and 1981 like ZX81 they have 1 KB of memory. One.
The Commodore 64 came out in 1982 and famously had 64KB of memory.
Commodore VIC-20 came out in 1980 with 20KB as well.
20KB of ROM and 5KB of RAM, though that was expandable!
5KB of RAM
TIL! I've been living a lie for decades thinking the 20 in VIC-20 was the amount of RAM like the 64 in C64 meant the amount of RAM. I only owned the C64, never a VIC-20.
Not really, mainframes could have 8 megs of core in the 1960s.
I could never get my Zx81 to save data tape.
Funny observation on the side:
This content is geoblocked in Germany.
And, as far as I can tell, trying a few destinations with my VPN: only in Germany...
So what the hell is in there, that we Germans must not see???? 😆
You already know too much, ja?
l would say there is more advanced information tech in 70s era Voyager than in a typical current German public administration office. ;-)
Fear of change and modernization. :)
😆
It's blocked on the server side, though... (nginx message).
Maybe some German "Neuland" shenanigans the page owner doesn't want to be exposed to ...
It’s a slippery slope. If you let the village know there’s a ship sailing the cosmos then next thing you know they’ll want the rathaus to use email instead of fax. Just best to follow the rules and keep things the way they are.
So france, austria, works? Else, if europe, it could be not wanting to comply with GDPR. Or germnay has a few extra rules they don't like.
Edit: Switzerland works, but maybe because IP ranges aren't that exact.
Had been thinking the same at first.
But France and Austria did work. Only Germany was blocked.
Only thing that is unique to Germany I can think of is the hate speech laws that are very specific towards Nazi symbolism and Holocaust treatment.
Maybe they had some article (or comments from users...) once that collided with that and decided to just block Germany to make their life less stressful.
Why 8 tracks? They always sucked, even when they were in their prime. Cassettes were always the far superior format in every way.
The only advantage an 8 track might have is that it was on a loop, so it would repeat by being on a single hub, and, spooling out from the center, and regathering on the outside. That required a dry lubricant on the back of the tape, that would eventually wear off, and the tape would jam up. It was even more prevalent with longer than average albums, like double albums (White Album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, etc.).
I guarantee that that 8-track loop jammed up decades ago.
So theres not enough magnetism out there to negatively affect the recordings?
The “8 Track” in Voyager is not your standard 8 track, it’s a DTR and is arranged differently than the consumer tape cartridge for music. It was shut down about a decade ago, not because it was failing, but because of the power requirements.
FWIW, 8 tracks were pretty good sound for the time. Previously there was no portable music unless you brought a record player with you. They got passed up quickly by the cassette, though.
Does anyone know if the code that Voyager 1 (or similar era tech) is running is available anywhere for inspection? I would love to poke around in such a historical code base.
I don't really understand what I'm looking at, but this looks like a good place to start:
https://github.com/SRF0x41/Voyager1
There are links to actual code at JPL, but I don't know if everything is published online.
I would think not. They wouldn’t want anyone analyzing it and attempting to send code to the Voyager. Some asshole would break it for lols or politics.
A kilobyte must have sounded like so much memory back then.
A byte is 8 bits. Even if we want to call bits quarters ($0.25) and bytes dollars, 69KB would be $69,000! That's a lot of dollars.
(And it's actually 1,024 or something instead of 1,000, which just increases it that much more).
It's crazy how KBs used to be incredibly meaningful, and now we're buying multi-TB drives like they're nothing!
EDIT: Math fail. Let's say TWO bits are a quarter...lmao
buying multi-TB drives like they’re nothing!
😭
Well...up until recently
Last year, I bought a 22TB hard drive to recover from a 17TB drive failure. I barely got my wife to agree to the one drive, and simply could not convince her that we should get a backup. Our compromise was that I'd add a category to our budget with a year-long goal for a new hard drive. On Friday, I bought my new hard drive after wiping out the category, cashing some old bonds, and borrowing some money from a friend who also uses my server. I wanna fucking cry...
I remember my first 2GB flash drive. I thought I had sooo much storage...
Years later when I learned I could get an SD card with 32GB, I was like "It comes in 32GB? 🤯"
And don't even get me started on my first 1TB hard drive!
I was alive when computer RAM was measured in MB, not GB. Yes, I am an old codger
I was alive when computer RAM was measured in KB and when you wanted to have more of it, you had to manually solder it to the main board... Youngling.
I remember having to fuck around with master/slave configurations with drives. So many headaches were had trying to get them in the right order. Those were the days heh.
Hopefully it doesn't get blown up by some bored Klingon.
It and its sibling are probably the only working examples of flywire memory left in existence. That memory with little ferrite cores threaded with 3 wires was very labour intensive to make but was the backbone of the entire computing industry at the time. Very solid and reliable.
Aliens find it and love our retro tech. "8 track!"
aliens arrive on Earth with a brutal message of aggression:
"Puny Earthlings! We have surpassed your pathetic 8-track technology and have invented... 9-track tapes! Cower before our might!"
Sorry aliens but you'll need to go back to your science labs because we have since discovered how to compact discs themselves. No more data discs the size of records, we can fit an entire 70 minutes worth of full fidelity (to our ears) digital audio and then surpassed even that and managed to get it up to 74 minutes! 700 times 2 to the power of 23 bits of arbitrary data (or maybe it's just 700 times 8,000,000, we never did figure out the concept of honestly describing things marketers want to sell), all within our outstretched fingers or around a single extended finger.
ah..back when Star Trek had some actual science fiction in plots.
