PopMech makes it sound more arcane thane it might be: it's not that much out of the ordinary to know (or learn) assembly and Fortran or to have to work with com

PopMech makes it sound more arcane thane it might be: it's not that much out of the ordinary to know (or learn) assembly and Fortran or to have to work with computers that have 64K RAM (some modern microcontrollers have less[1]) I imagine it would be as hard as it sounds if they would require a specialist with years of experience in their particular dialect of Fortran and some particular assembler, expecting them to be productive right away. But it looks to me that they just have a peculiar setup and need someone who is able and willing to learn it - that's a situation plenty of companies have. Now a Voyager computer itself looks like a peculiar piece of technology in itself - is it one of a kind? If so, who made an assembler and Fortran compiler for it? Unfortunately, the article (or any others I googled up) doesn't go into that. Is there a description of Voyager computer publicly available? So far, I find it the most marvelous that a tape recorder is alive and well after 40 years of regular usage: the computer memory of the day was not nearly enough to hold scientific data, so it's being written on a 8-track tape recorder, sent to Earth and then overwritten again, in a loop. Still, even with minimial usage, I have trouble imagining how a single tape reel could last 40 years of regular use. In space. [1] List of common microcontrollers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_microcontrollers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_microcontroller... STM32 F0: http://www.st.com/stm32f0 http://www.st.com/stm32f0