Has Voyager 1 escaped the Sun yet? Yes, but also no, say boffins Voyager 1, the deep space probe launched in 1977 and thought to have left the Solar System hasn't entirely escaped the parts of space where Sol holds sway. So says a new contribution to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Triangulation of the interstellar magnetic field . Boffins have debated whether Voyager 1 has left the …
Sorting out the R&D chip bin the other day I came across a piece of Veroboard with an Intel 8008 on it. There are enough memory chips to make 1kb of storage too. With so many legacy projects still running maybe I should put in on Ebay along with the 2708 eproms...
I am old enough to tick the Algol box (Elliot 803) but gave Fortran a miss along with Cobol.
I guess those of us that regard ourselves as "old timers" will know how to hand craft code to get performance from low resources. It's a pity that Microsoft lost the art and just regard more mips and more memory as the answer to sloppy bloatware.
To be attempting to recruit when the guy left last week. It not like they didn't know he was going to retire at some point - like for the last 15 years or so!!
He could have been training his padewan for that time!!
@Tom 7 you are forgetting that the Us considers itself the absolute centre of the universe, most of them could not point out Europe on the globe - allegedly !
I'd think that the specialist assembler skills were to maintain and test the ground based copies of Voyager systems. I'm sure thre wouldn't be any 'reprogramming' of Voyager at its current distance. Can they still send it commands (which would need to be tested on the ground based systems)?
The guy met Nichelle Nichols eight years ago, not recently, when he retired.
The picture caption from the CNN report you linked to...
'Nichelle Nichols of "Star Trek" poses with Voyager operations team member Larry Zottarelli, who received a certificate of appreciation for being on the Voyager team since launch. The award was on the 30th anniversary of Voyager (2007).'
Far out!
Anyway, here is the link to the original piece on CNN (which El Reg found for us and kindly reworded).
I really like the "It's like flying an Apple II computer" quote.
Oh, and according to the CNN article, Voyager has an 8-track tape recorder. Groovy!
I vote that we declare the Voyager probe to have left the solar system.
I also vote we deal with anyone claiming to the contrary in the future by hitting the troublemaking sod in the snoot with a Spear and Jackson Number Three (with copper edged scoop).
Scientists! Stop arguing about nomenclature and DO SCIENCE!
If there was a chance to work on this project or similar ones. I know a tiny bit of FORTRAN, have worked in assembly with other languages, and nothing else. I'm not much of a programmer overall, but damn, what a great project to be a part of. (of course I'd like to make at least as much money as I do now, but that's survival)
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