4 Feb
2020
4 Feb
'20
7:25 a.m.
My thoughts exactly. I was once lucky enough to visit the NASA's
Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in the ACT just a few miles out of
Canberra c. 1976 or 77, and they had some sizeable minicomputers in
their computer room. (How many I don't know.) I imagine they would've
been used to record the transmissions on tape and do some preliminary
processing, before sending the tapes to NASA HQ in the States for
storage and further analysis.
I think what NASA did with their early probes would've made Real
Programmers (TM) sit up and gasp. :)
Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station
during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the
details.
Wesley Parish
On 2/4/20, Michael Kjörling <michael(a)kjorling.se> wrote:
On 3 Feb 2020 12:06 -0500, from crossd(a)gmail.com (Dan
Cross):
Regardless, one DOES wonder in what capacity
FORTRAN was used in the
mission. Was it used on the onboard computers, or was it used on the
downlink stations for e.g. data analysis?
I would be _extremely_ surprised if the Voyager probes themselves run
FORTRAN code.
Maybe, possibly, just barely _might_, they run code that was compiled
from FORTRAN code, but that seems unlikely.
Somewhat less unrealistically, they might run software which was
initially prototyped in FORTRAN, before being translated into
something else. But even that seems a stretch.
Adding up the numbers in [1], the memory capacity of each of the
Voyager probes comes out to a total of 557,248 bits (not bytes), split
between custom-built computers with 16 and 18 bit word lengths.
Wikipedia summarizes it as "Total number of words among the six
computers is about 32K." which seems about right; 557,248/17 ~ 32,779,
and two out of the three computer pairs are said to use 18-bit words.
For ground data processing systems to run code written in FORTRAN does
however seem plausible to me.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Computers_and_data_processing
--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
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