Launched 4 decades ago and its still only 1 light day away from us.
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In the future RAM will be so rare that a venture capital firm launches an analog rocket to retrieve Voyager 1 and 2.
A kilobyte must have sounded like so much memory back then.
A byte is 8 bits. Even if we want to call bits quarters ($0.25) and bytes dollars, 69KB would be $69,000! That's a lot of dollars.
(And it's actually 1,024 or something instead of 1,000, which just increases it that much more).
It's crazy how KBs used to be incredibly meaningful, and now we're buying multi-TB drives like they're nothing!
EDIT: Math fail. Let's say TWO bits are a quarter...lmao
buying multi-TB drives like they’re nothing!
😭
Last year, I bought a 22TB hard drive to recover from a 17TB drive failure. I barely got my wife to agree to the one drive, and simply could not convince her that we should get a backup. Our compromise was that I'd add a category to our budget with a year-long goal for a new hard drive. On Friday, I bought my new hard drive after wiping out the category, cashing some old bonds, and borrowing some money from a friend who also uses my server. I wanna fucking cry...
I remember my first 2GB flash drive. I thought I had sooo much storage...
Years later when I learned I could get an SD card with 32GB, I was like "It comes in 32GB? 🤯"
And don't even get me started on my first 1TB hard drive!
Wouldn't a byte be $2 if a bit was a quarter, or do you mean 2 bits are a quarter? Also i think you were right to use powers of 10 in your estimate. Article says kilobyte, not kibibyte. I really like what your conversion illustrates, I'm just tripping up on the details. I could be wrong-- commenting so someone can correct me if i am-- if a bit is a quarter, 69 Kilobytes would be $138,000
LOL...yes. should've been an Eighth, but we don't have a coin for that.
Your math is right. I was just thinking of a Byte as $1.00 and going from there. Then remembered that bits are smaller, but they shouldn't be $1 because a single bit is not very powerful. But making it worth $1 or $0.01 would make the math messier.
But yes. Two bits are a quarter is probably the best compromise! Lol
If a bit is 3.5 grams, then a byte is an ounce...
That makes a kilobyte about 1000 ounces!
So then a TB must be about...a metric shitton?
It's a trillion ounces, I don't know how much that is in metric...
I was alive when computer RAM was measured in KB and when you wanted to have more of it, you had to manually solder it to the main board... Youngling.
Funny observation on the side:
This content is geoblocked in Germany.
And, as far as I can tell, trying a few destinations with my VPN: only in Germany...
So what the hell is in there, that we Germans must not see???? 😆
Fear of change and modernization. :)
😆
It's blocked on the server side, though... (nginx message).
Maybe some German "Neuland" shenanigans the page owner doesn't want to be exposed to ...
You already know too much, ja?
So france, austria, works? Else, if europe, it could be not wanting to comply with GDPR. Or germnay has a few extra rules they don't like.
Edit: Switzerland works, but maybe because IP ranges aren't that exact.
Had been thinking the same at first.
But France and Austria did work. Only Germany was blocked.
Only thing that is unique to Germany I can think of is the hate speech laws that are very specific towards Nazi symbolism and Holocaust treatment.
Maybe they had some article (or comments from users...) once that collided with that and decided to just block Germany to make their life less stressful.
Maybe they really couldn't be bothered with writing an Impressum!
Impressum would only be a necessity if they were targeting the German market, which they (as an English language only site) are clearly not.
I meant it as a joke but I could imagine them getting one email from Germany about GDPR and then deciding to geoblock the whole country instead of complying (and ignoring the fact it applies elsewhere in Europe too).
It and its sibling are probably the only working examples of flywire memory left in existence. That memory with little ferrite cores threaded with 3 wires was very labour intensive to make but was the backbone of the entire computing industry at the time. Very solid and reliable.
In 1977 69 KB was huge memory. First home PC's from 1980 and 1981 like ZX81 they have 1 KB of memory. One.
The Commodore 64 came out in 1982 and famously had 64KB of memory.
Commodore VIC-20 came out in 1980 with 20KB as well.
20KB of ROM and 5KB of RAM, though that was expandable!
Link gives me a 403 error
Yep, same for me...
Its hard to maintain a link with a craft outside or solar system. There's a very tight orientation requirement and you have to set a very large delay for the expected response.
But 403 is "Forbidden".
So...

He plays "Commander Adams". It's been a while since I've seen it, but as I recall it's a pretty decent sci-fi movie. And it's the only serious role that I think I've ever seen him in.
He was a dramatic actor up until he did Airplane! That's one of the reasons he was cast in the role.
Surely you can’t be serious.
Yeah for a 60s sci fi movie it's pretty good
50s sci fi movie, actually.
Part of that groundbreaking film stuff starting in that decade, kicking off our modern understanding of the genre.
Twilight Zone also comes to mind.
Currently watching season 2 of it. Totally great stuff, so many "firsts" in there!
When I'm on a plane I still idly think about the possibility of there being a gremlin out there on the wing eating an engine...
(I fly a lot and even learned to fly gliders/sailplanes back in the day, so definitely not afraid of flying, but if I'm ever sat next to William Shatner I'm deplaning. No point taking chances. ;-).)
I have not seen this episode yet (it's in season 5, just checked).
Definitely looking forward to it!
We just watched the "Nick of time" episode not to long. Came as a surprise that Shatner was in there - it was kind of a culture shock for my son, suddenly seeing "Captain Kirk" as a superstitious groom in a 50s era dinner... :-)
Come on now, it's not that bad.
Voyager 1 is just 23h 32m 9.981s light seconds away.
One way.
Working again
Just tried it - still 403 for me.
Weird. Geoblocking maybe...? VPN blocking...?
Aliens find it and love our retro tech. "8 track!"
aliens arrive on Earth with a brutal message of aggression:
"Puny Earthlings! We have surpassed your pathetic 8-track technology and have invented... 9-track tapes! Cower before our might!"
Sorry aliens but you'll need to go back to your science labs because we have since discovered how to compact discs themselves. No more data discs the size of records, we can fit an entire 70 minutes worth of full fidelity (to our ears) digital audio and then surpassed even that and managed to get it up to 74 minutes! 700 times 2 to the power of 23 bits of arbitrary data (or maybe it's just 700 times 8,000,000, we never did figure out the concept of honestly describing things marketers want to sell), all within our outstretched fingers or around a single extended finger.
Does anyone know if the code that Voyager 1 (or similar era tech) is running is available anywhere for inspection? I would love to poke around in such a historical code base.
I don't really understand what I'm looking at, but this looks like a good place to start:
https://github.com/SRF0x41/Voyager1
There are links to actual code at JPL, but I don't know if everything is published online.
I would think not. They wouldn’t want anyone analyzing it and attempting to send code to the Voyager. Some asshole would break it for lols or politics.
Why 8 tracks? They always sucked, even when they were in their prime. Cassettes were always the far superior format in every way.
The only advantage an 8 track might have is that it was on a loop, so it would repeat by being on a single hub, and, spooling out from the center, and regathering on the outside. That required a dry lubricant on the back of the tape, that would eventually wear off, and the tape would jam up. It was even more prevalent with longer than average albums, like double albums (White Album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, etc.).
I guarantee that that 8-track loop jammed up decades ago.
The “8 Track” in Voyager is not your standard 8 track, it’s a DTR and is arranged differently than the consumer tape cartridge for music. It was shut down about a decade ago, not because it was failing, but because of the power requirements.
FWIW, 8 tracks were pretty good sound for the time. Previously there was no portable music unless you brought a record player with you. They got passed up quickly by the cassette, though.
So theres not enough magnetism out there to negatively affect the recordings?
If we wanted to impress the aliens, we should have sent MiniDiscs, even if it meant delaying the mission a little while.
And they got further and accomplished more than all the AI companies, combined, have done [with the TiBs of data].
Nice article, but the imperial units everywhere threw me off a little.
Same.
Here some data for the global audience:
- Current distance from Earth: ~15 billion miles → 24 billion kilometers.
- Speed: 38,000 mph → 17 km/s relative to the Sun.
- Annual travel distance: ~900 million miles → 1.45 billion kilometers per year.
- Tape length: 1,076 feet → 328 meters.
- Tape width: 0.5 inches → 1.27 cm.
- Tape durability: Designed to withstand 4,350 km of tape travel before wear.
- Diameter of the golden record: 12 inches → 30 cm.
69kb of ram is enough to explore space but 8gb will struggle to multi task.
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