"Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings

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ForHackernews · 2024-06 · Recommendation

If you're interested in the computers on the Voyager probes, this talk was really good: "Uptime 15,364 days" [VIDEO]

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throwaway888abc · 2023-10 · Recommendation

Love the Voyagers story. Just get me thinking: Why there is not more missions like this ? It takes significant time to cross "somewhere there", every year one launch could not hurt ? Edit: *Obligatory video: "Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings [VIDEO] Also here on HN: [LINK]

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retrac · 2023-08 · Recommendation

There's a book on the computers used at NASA from the beginning through to when it was written - late 80s, I think. Whole thing is available online [1] It has a chapter titled "Voyager - The Flying Computer Center". [2] It gives a high-level overview of the computers and software. Three different processors, each dual redundant. 18 and 16 bit machines. Comparable to early 1970s minicomputers. There's a good talk about the computers on the Voyagers available online here. [3] As far as I know, beyond what's available between those two sources, very little otherwise is available publicly on the computer hardware itself - no detailed architecture descriptions, instruction sets, electronics details, etc. And no software listings. Though if I had to guess the 18-bit machines are a lot like - but not the same as - the OBP/AOP/NSSC series [4]. A bit of Voyager trivia: the computers were reprogrammed in-flight to give new abilities the Voyagers didn't have at launch, such as new image compression algorithms to allow more images to be returned than originally anticipated. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK]

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