Marvellous craft

[erick (Eric)]

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

From the JPL website:-

"The Voyagers have enough electrical power and thruster fuel to operate at least until 2020. By that time, Voyager 1 will be 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion KM) from the Sun and Voyager 2 will be 10.5 billion miles (16.9 billion KM) away. Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Ophiucius. In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky."

And all done with:-

"There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.

Computer Command System (CCS) - 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.

Flight Data System (FDS) - 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each

Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - 16-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.

According to my calulations, that's a total of about 541KB, or small potatoes compared to today's microprocessors."

[dannat (Daniel)]

And microsoft have the cheek to sell people vista -

THere is a new linux distro being developed which will mirror windows XP, its called react OS, still developing but maybe next year will be stable enough to run your system on - in total just over 30MB

[Bassnut (Fred)]

for industrial control applications, with hand written machine code, 4k is often more than enough to do a hell of a lot (and fast). Its bloated hi level languages that need disproportionate amounts of code space (and needing fast processors as a result), long gone are the days of the tight coding craft. I had a crazy coder produce 500 bytes of code once (for a machine) that creamed a competitions effort on windoze (c++) of over a megabyte.

[MrB (Simon)]

Originally Posted by Bassnut

...
long gone are the days of the tight coding craft.
...

Maybe for PC's, but a lot of microcontrollers(I use some with as little as 256 words of memory) and embedded apps are still programmed with ASM.
Some C compilers for microcontrollers produce extremely efficient and compact code.

[madtuna (Steve)]

That "whoosh" noise you hear is the sound of what ever your talking about flying over the top of my head

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Yes, C is efficient, Ill give you that, the higher level variants not so much (but with more features, natch).