Voyager Status, What is it? Options

[tuvas]

Anyone know the latest Voyager status? I've hear rumors, but I'm wondering if anyone has anything more concrete (I won't share the rumors, as I really don't know much about it, so...)

[stevesliva]

That FDS history is better than anything else I found a few weeks back. And James Wooddell might be unhappy to hear them say that so many people of import have passed. It appears that he might be turning 91 before the month is out. The text cites a graduate paper from USC in 1974 as having a lot of documentation on the architecture.

That text does make it clear that the bigger issue is... what's the software on there, and if a bit's become stuck, what do you do about it. There, Edgar Blizzard is (maybe) 89. Richard Rice is a more generic name, but I can't see that he's necessarily passed, either.

I did sort of glean that the "registers" might simply be specific words in the memory, and "bad register" might be what means the other FDS was abandoned. Which might make a bad bit in a register harder to work around vs. like it was in a specific word of instruction memory like in the hard error in 1985. Yes, there are other registers, but rewriting that much of the code...

Oh, and it says a full FDS software load took 4hrs in 1984, which was then considered real slow because of lower bandwidth.