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My understanding is that its very well documented, but the funding isn't there to do much with it. I mean most of the team behind things like the Atari computer
by zoeysmithe 3y ago
My understanding is that its very well documented, but the funding isn't there to do much with it. I mean most of the team behind things like the Atari computers, Acorn, Commodore, early Apples, etc are retired but we can emulate them and understand these things on a very technical level. I know this isn't a great analogy, but ultimately age of the project or the age of the original team members isn't the bottleneck.
I sometimes see retro projects on hack-a-day done by people who could be the grandchildren of the original designers of those vintage chips and OS's. They probably know more about that chip or OS than the original people do just due to them being out of the game for so long. The same way people regularly lose to fifth graders in tests because they dont recall 5th grade science and civics. If anything your scenario might be the opposite! Grandpa might be asking his granddaughter how those registers worked or how to emulate his OS from 1982.
I remember reading about the team that maintains the Voyagers. Its a skeleton crew using legacy equipment to keep the communication going with the assumption the next decade, or even earlier, is going to be it.
NASA has the same problem the private sector has. Capitalism rewards things that will generate profit/prestige, not legacy cost centers, and NASA is not immune from that dynamic as NASA employees and managers want to maximize their income and prestige too. So the people maintaining or bug fixing old products are often lowest on the prestige, pay, recruiting, and profit spectrum than those chasing new things. They get the skeleton crew funding and can't do novel things, even if technically possible because of lack of staff and buy-in.
Passion projects make for feel-good documentaries like 'It's Quieter in the Twilight' but ultimately if society isn't vested in these teams, their hands will always be tied.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoI hate people just random throw in capitalism. Is the communism better in maintaining old code … do they even exist. Not to mention please we are here not for the money as most does not, just awe of what can be done for a computer job which love to do and have such legacy. Capitalism does not really exist. It is money, incentives, job, human … or love to hack.
- quickslowdown 3y agoI'm going to just outright dismiss this comment the way you're dismissing people talking about capitalism, a very real economic system we're all living under, since it's ridiculous on its face.
- jcadam 3y agoA young engineer must know that getting stuck on a legacy project is a career-limiting move. Happened to me when I got stuck on a old Ada codebase for a legacy aerospace system (unemployed in 2008, you take whatever job you can get), and it took years, and a good chunk of my spare time doing projects/studying, to find a company willing to give me a chance working on something modern again. Now, someday when I'm in my 60s/70s, and you have some legacy system written in some defunct language nobody under the age of 50 has any experience with, sure, I'll do it. But it'll cost you.
- trealira 3y agoWhy do companies do that? Shouldn't it be enough that you have experience contributing to a large project long-term and you can program decently? Is it that modern programming just requires different/additional programming skills compared to most old codebases, like writing asynchronous code?
- jcadam 3y ago> Why do companies do that? Sane hiring practices are inversely proportional to company size.
- robocat 3y agoI don't hire, but that story would make me want to hire you. It takes certain skills and pig-headedness to successfully work on old software! I once asked a company to rehire me saying that I only wanted to do software maintenance work (I wanted low stress). I am good at it, and it's hard to find people that want to do that work. They didn't rehire because although the manager really wanted me back, his idiot boss had taken it personally when I had quit. Idiot boss later got ousted to their dismay: I shouldn't enjoy that but I did!
- justin66 3y agoThe thing Voyager has going for it is, it's a small team. JPL is laying people off all over the place lately. I'm not sure if it's really "society" that is responsible for these funding difficulties, it's the politicians. If you ask a random member of the public how much of the federal budget is allocated to NASA, they'll generally give you a percentage that's wildly higher than the actual figure.