I was curious how they automated all the testing and data sending back then. In Wikipedia it mentions that the Viking landers had 24 bit CPUs with 18K of plated

I was curious how they automated all the testing and data sending back then. In Wikipedia it mentions that the Viking landers had 24 bit CPUs with 18K of plated-wire memory and 1280 megabits of tape storage. That's actually not bad! Think about what you could do with an Apple II (8-bit CPU, 4/8/16k memory), and the Vikings were much more powerful. They were also the size of a Volkswagon, but I'm not sure how much was equipment vs computer. A software update killed one of the landers by accidentally overwriting the antenna software. (40 years later, not much has changed...) More info: https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch5-6.html https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch5-6.html