• stoly@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    No documentation, imagine! The original designers–dead. This person had to reverse engineer every aspect of that system, though I can’t imagine that it has more than, say, 64KB of RAM. Still an enormous amount of work but not like trying to figure out how an iPhone works without any documentation.

    • palordrolap@kbin.run
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      5 months ago

      https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/

      According to the above, the software was written in FORTRAN.

      There’s probably at least one warehouse somewhere full of green bar sprocketed teletype / dot matrix paper with the source code on it, if not also magnetic tapes. And that assumes they haven’t archived it in other places and formats in the last ~50 years.

      70kB though. That’s a huge amount of memory for 1977. Low-end personal computers were still selling with less than that 10 years later.

      That said, the article doesn’t distinguish ROM and RAM, so I wonder how much of that is ROM. ROM is and was far cheaper.

      Also, that 70 might be a rounding up of 65536 bytes, which is 64k, so you might be spot on with your guess there.