jesus christ, i dont think ive ever seen an article that beats around the bush for as long as this one does before finally getting to the point.

anyways, for those who don't have the patience, the title is misleading. it's just some old software from the 90s. It's only ancient if you're one of those people who completely rewrites their entire code base from the ground up every two years because to pad out your resume with whatever bullshit new "framework" is in vogue. Contrary to popular belief you actually can just keep using the same software indefinitely, it doesn't degrade with age, and for the most part the hardware lasts pretty long too as long as you take care of it (with a few exceptions like optical drives and SSDs).

How about traveling-wave vacuum tubes from the pre-transistor era. Doesn't Voyager use them to generate its RF transmission power?

From rumors I heard, for a while there before 2005, NASA was one of the biggest buyers of salvage sun4 hardware. they had multiple missions running on it and there were some particular high rate data input cards on mbus that were hard to duplicate on other platforms.

"we have a closet full of sparc 10s, we figure that'll be enough to last as long as the satellite"

The spacecraft doesn't have a fuel gauge ...

Zoom call with 100 Airbus engineers ...

The original software for part of the onboard navigation system was running on a Windows 98 PC that no-one could find the password to and ended up using bolt cutters to extract the hard drives.

Talk about a deep space horror story!

It's not immediatley on point, but the title reminds me that many here may enjoy the documentary about the Voyager team as it works today called It's Quieter in the Twilight.

> Launched almost 46 years ago in 1977, the twin Voyager probes continue to send back data from beyond the Solar System.

> I checked with Nasa, which has assured me that the spacecraft are still being controlled from the same beige cubicle in an annex of its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that I visited in 2017, marked with a homemade cardboard sign reading: "Mission critical hardware – PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH".

I throw around the term "mission critical" maybe too easily. Because that beige cubicle with the homemade cardboard sign sounds humbling.

Also NASA's infrastructure is crumbling, and 25% of workers are eligible for retirement.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-buildings-are-ev...

A lot of software wraps old code. There is no reason to replace what works and works well. Besides, modern doesn’t generally mean more reliable or performant. It’s often the other way around.

Over the last few decades, embedded programming hasn’t changed much, for example. The rate of change is much higher with the ultra-abstracted languages.

space-x has taken over Nasa to some degree, i think