Here, read this. It’s fucking amazing.

Read the May 6 original before the two top-posted updates.

It’s incredible that:

  • Anything designed built in the 70’s and launched into space is still functional.
  • NASA has the ability to debug a computer that’s nearly fourteen fucking billion miles away.
  • They can do it at the bit level.
  • They have an identical computer they can test their changes on.
  • And they can fix it.

It’s easy to dismiss NASA’s achievements in the 60’s and 70’s as quaint relics–pieces of a publicity war fought against a cold-war adversary.  A cell phone is a supercomputer compared to the computers that landed man on the moon.  When I see the perfection of work like this, it’s a testament to what the human race can accomplish.

Huh.  Apparently I wrote this in May and then never actually published it.  Whoops.