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"Though state-of-the art in the 1970s, the Voyager spacecraft have only four kilobytes of storage onboard …” Love this factoid. I wonder who manufactured the
by docmechanic 3y ago
"Though state-of-the art in the 1970s, the Voyager spacecraft have only four kilobytes of storage onboard …”
Love this factoid. I wonder who manufactured the memory chips.
- redundantly 3y agoThere are actually three separate computer systems in the probe: two with 4K and one with 8K memory. Each computer system is a fully redundant pair, so in total there's actually 32K of memory in the probe. During certain parts of the mission they ran some systems in a non-redundant mode so they could double their processing and get more science done. What they did with the Voyager 1 & 2 probes was amazing. Edit: actually I am mistaken. Each probe had around 69KB of memory. I confused word capacity with kilobytes when looking it up. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/multimedia/vgrmemory.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/multimedia/vgrmem...
- docmechanic 3y agoAgreed. I was about 10 years old at the time they launched, and they still capture my imagination today.
- psychphysic 3y agoFactoid means myth does it not?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoYes and no. It appears they are using it correctly but it was initially used more specifically as "unverified at best". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid > A factoid is either an invented or assumed statement presented as a fact, or a true but brief or trivial item of news or information.
- NikkiA 3y agoIt's apparently all "Plated wire memory" which was a Bell Labs invention, so quite possibly Bell themselves. Edit: more likely made by Honeywell, since they seem to have made the other plated wire memory used in the shuttle.
- tredre3 3y agoVoyager 2 had several megabytes of tape storage, but I'm guessing it's no longer in use. And according to [1] each of its computers has more than four kilobytes of memory. Though I honestly don't know if Wired is a more reliable source... 1. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/ https://www.wired.com/2013/09/vintage-voyager-probes/
- graypegg 3y agoI can only imagine a 31st century being complaining about sourcing belts to restore their vintage voyager probe for their retro tech YouTube channel.