This is a great article appearing in the NYTimes Magazine a week ago. How they fixed the Voyager spacecraft, and the issue of the machine-level programming arcana which only septagenarians and octogenarians seem to understand:
The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe - The New York Times
The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe - The New York Times
Wow.
"Assuming a much narrower bandwidth, and manually subtracting the Doppler effect, they recalibrated their signal. It worked — but to this day, the same calculation must precede every command."
Getting a signal to and from those machines, is almost unimaginable. That is some real DX.
I was a sophomore taking an intro astronomy class when the first flyby took place. The prof. was giddy.
Win W5JAG
"Assuming a much narrower bandwidth, and manually subtracting the Doppler effect, they recalibrated their signal. It worked — but to this day, the same calculation must precede every command."
Getting a signal to and from those machines, is almost unimaginable. That is some real DX.
I was a sophomore taking an intro astronomy class when the first flyby took place. The prof. was giddy.
Win W5JAG
What controller are you using George? Last time I did any assembler was in the late 80's - 8085/Z80 8 bit stuff. I stick to C now and ARM controllers.
I hated computers. It was like programming some equations nobody knows what for using Fortran-4 language, waiting in the lane to punch cards, then waiting in the lane to give them to run, them a week later getting a print trying to understand what it was, and what that errors mean...
Only once it was useful, when I slipped inside of a program my own code, to calculate all notes up and down from 440 Hz.
Only once it was useful, when I slipped inside of a program my own code, to calculate all notes up and down from 440 Hz.
Mostly microchip processors at the moment, but some intel assembler - we have some driver level code that needs to be very fast running in Win Server, C/C++ just isn't up to it!
During university and a career in IT I learnt
Fortran
Algol 68
Schoonschip (you will definitely have to Google that!)
Coral 66 (you may need to Google that one too)
Macro-11 (and learnt to read PDP-11 machine code too)
C (tried to learn C++ too but didn't get very far)
SQL
Matlab
Also learnt a bit about 8080, Z80, 8086 (horrible!), 68000 (nice!), PIC.
I am still well below 70, so perhaps some ignorant journalist thought that machine code disappeared almost before general purpose computers were invented?
Fortran
Algol 68
Schoonschip (you will definitely have to Google that!)
Coral 66 (you may need to Google that one too)
Macro-11 (and learnt to read PDP-11 machine code too)
C (tried to learn C++ too but didn't get very far)
SQL
Matlab
Also learnt a bit about 8080, Z80, 8086 (horrible!), 68000 (nice!), PIC.
I am still well below 70, so perhaps some ignorant journalist thought that machine code disappeared almost before general purpose computers were invented?
I learned assembly on a PDP-8 with core memory, and later on the Intel 8008, 8080, 8051 and so on.
Harris Semiconductor came out with a HD-6120, which was the equivalent of a PDP-8 microprocessor which several of my associates and I built. It was interesting to see the comparison between the PDP-8 and a Harris equivalent. If IRRC, there were some minor instruction differences between the PDP-8 and the Harris part.
https://www.grc.com/sn/files/HD6120_Specifications.pdf
Harris Semiconductor came out with a HD-6120, which was the equivalent of a PDP-8 microprocessor which several of my associates and I built. It was interesting to see the comparison between the PDP-8 and a Harris equivalent. If IRRC, there were some minor instruction differences between the PDP-8 and the Harris part.
https://www.grc.com/sn/files/HD6120_Specifications.pdf
The english wikipedia is funny Schoonschip - Wikipedia
I used to love Fortran back in the day. My way of socializing in engineering computation classes was hanging out in the lab and helping people with their programs. A few people started calling me 'Fortran-man' (don't know if they knew about the comics or not) and the name stuck for a while. Some got the impression that I was a TA because I was fairly good at it. When I told these latter people that I couldn't figure out their programming errors, they sometimes got a little upset with me
Python reads a lot like Fortran, IMO. I plan to play around with Numpy some time, but most of my quick and dirty stuff can be achieved with excel in less time so I don't have much motivating me to learn python.
I think that the love of tech that these folks manifest is a boon to mankind. It's the same reason that we labor to squeeze out the last scintilla of music from electronic recordings. It's the same thing which drives my wife to search, endless hours, for a cure for a pediatric cancer.
I dare not call them "elder" as they predate me by only a decade. If I called my wife "elder" you'd be looking for the body parts!
Parenthetically, both my wife and I learned Fortran in college, and my biz partner did Cobol. The most profitable programming venture, however, was the simple exploitation of Excel macro's.
I dare not call them "elder" as they predate me by only a decade. If I called my wife "elder" you'd be looking for the body parts!
Parenthetically, both my wife and I learned Fortran in college, and my biz partner did Cobol. The most profitable programming venture, however, was the simple exploitation of Excel macro's.
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