Talking of old processors - did you guys see this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZb4NLXx1aM
It's very low tech (Z80) and he boots it up on a bread board. Sort of what you'd expect of that really old stuff on those probes. regards, Preet, in Auckland NZ On 6 January 2017 at 21:09, Davy Jones <djones...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pathfinder (1996) was a very low tech / love cost proof of concept > mission, so a hardened 8 bit processor is not out of the question. Nasa > doesn't use of the shelf chips. In it's craft. That's why you will see > laptops all over the place in Nasa footage, they don't meet the radiation > proof specs of Nasa but are not mission critical. > Converting. A - 65 to hex I would need a chart too, or a bit of paper and > a pen. > > Davy > > Sent from my iPhone > > > On 6 Jan 2017, at 03:13, Greg Keogh <gfke...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Folks, we watched The Martian last night on a friend's huge TV with 3-D > glasses (which really work, it's a technical marvel). Fabulous looking > movie, a bit too long, clearly targeted for the big screen and those sorts > of audiences, science stretched to the limits of credibility but you don't > really care. > > > > I noticed that IT played a small co-starring role. One astrophysicist > boffin was huddled in the corridor of a super-computer centre with his > laptop plugged directly into one of the racks running slingshot orbit > simulations (is it faster that way?). Matt Damon communicating with a > camera pointing to base-16 placards (he shamefully needed an ASCII chart to > decode the digits). > > > > Matt is using a hex editor at one point to directly to allow cross-probe > communication. I'm not sure if that hex was actually anything like > recognisable machine code, or it was real Mars Rover code from 2006 (did it > use a well-known chip and OS?) > > > > One lady in the mothership's crew must have been a highly skilled > programmer, as she had to do some emergency drastic refactoring of some > sort (I can't remember the details now). > > > > A bit of cryptography/steganography ... a NASA guy sent a secret message > to one of the crew using a fake broken email attachment, but the message > was simply encoded as hex digits. > > > > There were lots of quick screen-shots showing nice graphics and source > code. Luckily they avoided the cliché of having ludicrous complicated > meaningless screens full of little windows and scrolling hex dumps (as in > most action movies, like Die Hard 4). I'm sure I noticed some actual LISP > code at one point, it was quick, but there were many lines of giveaway > (((()))). A few other times I saw function definitions in lower case with > underscores, so perhaps it was Python, but it was too quick to be sure. > > > > Greg K >
