News NASA is confident it can recover the Voyager 1 but it'll require some time

Apr 1, 2020
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Hardware built in the 70s by the lowest bidder exposed to high energy radiation, micro-meteroids, and temperatures less than 3°K: Fails after 45 years.

Hardware built in the 90s by the lowest bidder in Earth's orbit shielded by its magnetic field (Hubble): Multiple repair missions and component replacements required to maintain functionality.

Hardware built in the 2020s on Earth shielded from radiation and kept in temperature and hazard controlled environments: Fails before warranty expires (or even before it's paid off).



At this rate in another decade things will fail before they even leave the factory.
 
Apr 7, 2024
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It's "peek" instead of "poke". Or perhaps more precisely "dump" to emphasis on the scale of it.

By several decades of conventions, "peek" (and "dump") reads from the memory while "poke" writes into memory.

In this situation, hopefully perhaps the latter will fix the problem when the time comes to decide on the action.
 
Apr 6, 2024
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It's "peek" instead of "poke". Or perhaps more precisely "dump" to emphasis on the scale of it.

By several decades of conventions, "peek" (and "dump") reads from the memory while "poke" writes into memory.

In this situation, hopefully perhaps the latter will fix the problem when the time comes to decide on the action.
Now that does take me back.

Remember when getting your hands on an eight bit microprocessor, meant some circuit construction to get it to do anything. Then you hand assembled the machine code, using switches and LEDs to set each bit at a time: there was NO software available.

It was laborious, so next development was a little machine code routine to read entry from a hex keypad, and place in the memory locations specified in a register that you also primed from the hex keypad. Next, a routine and some circuitry to display this content on seven segment displays.

These two routines became your 'PEEK' and 'POKE' code that could be called once you progressed to an alphanumeric keyboard: prior to that, you had activated a switch to perform the action, so had not needed to name them.

They were the first routines you needed to write, apart from initialising the processor and driving the keyboard and seven segment displays.