Oldest computer used by the U.S. government: Voyager Probes

SomeGuy

Just thought I would share this here. There some discussion over on SoylentNews about how the Voyager Probes are among the oldest computers "used" by the government.:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/01/07/2040215

Of course most people these days can't fathom any device lasting more than a year or two, or anything that doesn't include bright blazing blue LEDs, pictures of cats, and vendor supplied buttrape.

FORTRAN and 64K? Meh, sounds downright luxurious to me.

altracker9

Someguy said:
"FORTRAN and 64K? Meh, sounds downright luxurious to me."

That's exactly why I love my old Dos and TRS80 PCs. They can basically do all that you need without all the extraneous garbage.

thinkpadman

Interesting - wonder how durable that 8-track tape is in space to keep rewriting 64 KB data to it.

Without seeing this, I'd have been thinking the oldest satellite would have encompassed Intel's 486 processors as I think they were used at some point.

Back on ground, I recall reading a little while ago about some small-mid sized business somewhere in the States, that would handle either the payroll or accounting system via punch cards still.
Update, just found the web link, it was the IBM 402 from 1948: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html

Icon

thinkpadman wrote:

Interesting - wonder how durable that 8-track tape is in space to keep rewriting 64 KB data to it.

Without seeing this, I'd have been thinking the oldest satellite would have encompassed Intel's 486 processors as I think they were used at some point.

I believe it was the Intel 386EX (embedded 386) that was used in the satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386EX

As an interesting side-note, Intel was manufacturing 386 and 486 CPUs up until 2007.

thinkpadman wrote:

Back on ground, I recall reading a little while ago about some small-mid sized business somewhere in the States, that would handle either the payroll or accounting system via punch cards still.
Update, just found the web link, it was the IBM 402 from 1948: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html

The U.S. nuclear program is still operated by 8-inch diskettes. While I'm sure this is concerning to some degree, regarding bit-rot, it's quite secure.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ ... oppy-disks