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Antique Voyager Technology
sea_stuart writes with a story from the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia. It is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. Here's a little background on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. "The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked... [T]he 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. 'The Voyager technology is so outmoded,' said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, 'we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them.'"
No seriously, what bullshit is this article? Does it say that no one can make some device that samples 32 bits/s communication? Never mind computers, a simple one-chip design with a memory card for intermediate storage. Maybe even hook some network chip to it and connect it to your network. Give it an IP address and a web browser and you're good to go.
Seriously, no one can build this? My god, I submit that you can communicate with voyager with a bunch of latches and flipflops in 7400 hardware.