• FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

    That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

    It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

    • nxdefiant@startrek.website
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      5 months ago

      Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.

          • Artyom@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            It’s not Slack’s fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they’re set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.

            All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn’t have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.

          • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I mean, unironically, yeah.

            It’s not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn’t moving on from outdated forms of communication, it’s that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

            Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it (and their searches are trash).

            • sudo42@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it

              You’ve just discovered their business case. So many new businesses these days only insinuate themselves into an existing process in order to co-opt it and charge rents.

            • ferret@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago
              1. Don’t use google as your email provider
              2. Keep backups of your email (you can do this on gmail, too)
        • nxdefiant@startrek.website
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          5 months ago

          IBM is 100, but the Internet didn’t exist in 1924, so we’ll say the clock starts in 1989. I’m pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

      https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

      They don’t use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

      That means “written in assembly” means “written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn’t document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke”.