OT: VOYAGER 1 STILL GOING!

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BigDumbDinosaur
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Re: OT: VOYAGER 1 STILL GOING!

Post by BigDumbDinosaur »

commodorejohn wrote:
Aldrin actually did have to reboot it several times during the lunar descent...!

...thereby limiting crashes to the computer and not the lunar module.  :D

Airbus could have learned a lesson from that before having one of their fly-by-wire-and-computer planes go down due to an unanticipated software sequence denying the pilot manual control at an inopportune moment.
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!
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commodorejohn
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Re: OT: VOYAGER 1 STILL GOING!

Post by commodorejohn »

Indeed...
DRG
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Re: OT: VOYAGER 1 STILL GOING!

Post by DRG »

commodorejohn wrote:
...they just made it as quick and simple as possible for it to resume from a crash, pick up where it left off, and give the pilot control again ;) Aldrin actually did have to reboot it several times during the lunar descent...!
Yes, I understand that the computer rebooted itself after each 1201 or 1202 alarm. https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a11/a11.1201-pa.html. There was only 2K of "RAM" and to cope with this, some memory locations were used by up to 7 programs - now that needed some keeping track of: imagine a program assuming it was reading the calculated altitude only to read in the speed because it was overwritten by another program!
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