Slashdot Mirror
Mars and the History of Antacids
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's retrospective today on the 1976 Mars Viking mission describes the first probe to orbit another planet, and the first biology experiments based on soil sampling. Program managers maintained a dynamic 'worry list', which included a 1970's computer that opened like a wireframe book. The all-important biology experiments could not be tested prior to launch, then lightning struck the probe components (at Kennedy's Explosive Safe Area Building)."
NASA managers found a way to convince the goverment to fund this mission: they told Bush that the martians are developing weapons of mass destruction. They have reliable intelligence: a complete report from secret agent Herbert G. Wells.
http://www.astrobio.net/articles/images/computer_t est.jpg
Thankfully, hairdos miniaturized along with the computers.
Beware the Giant Hairballs of Mars!
Sort of gives a whole new meaning to the term "memory pages" now doesn't it?
Especially as those "hair thin wires" are being threaded through the donut-shaped magnetic cores that made up the computer's RAM. (one donut per bit! Ain't core-memory fun?)
Progress is the process of making yesterday's innovations obsolete.?
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
Its that very contrution technique shown in those pictures why memory is sometimes refered to as 'pages'.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
Maybe the lighning strike is the reason that the data about life were inconclusive. Either there is life but Voyager decided to hide it from us, or Voyager was detecting its own newly alive self. I learned about this stuff from a documentary movie called "Short Circuit."
This space available.