Right now, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, a 48-year-old spacecraft is hurtling through interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour.
  • itisileclerk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7 hours

    In 1977 69 KB was huge memory. First home PC’s from 1980 and 1981 like ZX81 they have 1 KB of memory. One.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
      5 hours

      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!”

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 hours

        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.

  • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    13 hours

    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??? 😆

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        6 hours

        l would say there is more advanced information tech in 70s era Voyager than in a typical current German public administration office. ;-)

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        7 hours

        Impressum would only be a necessity if they were targeting the German market, which they (as an English language only site) are clearly not.

        • robsteranium@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7 hours

          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).

          • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            5 hours

            By now I am curious enough that I consider just writing them a mail and ask…

            Edit:
            Just did. Will post if they give me an answer…

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      10 hours

      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.

      Archive link

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        9 hours

        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.

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        13 hours

        😆

        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 …

        • Dr. Unabart@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          13 hours

          It’s a slippery slope. If you let the village know there’s a ship sailing the cosmos then next thing you know they’ll want the rathaus to use email instead of fax. Just best to follow the rules and keep things the way they are.

  • Greyghoster@aussie.zoneEnglish
    16 hours

    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.

  • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3 hours

    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

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1 hour

        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!

      • fartographer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13 hours

        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…

    • osanna@lemmy.vgEnglish
      12 hours

      I was alive when computer RAM was measured in MB, not GB. Yes, I am an old codger

      • axh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7 hours

        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.

    • pemptago@lemmy.mlEnglish
      12 hours

      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

      • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3 hours

        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

      • NoWay@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23 hours

        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.

        • Haquer@lemmy.todayEnglish
          22 hours

          Come on now, it’s not that bad.

          Voyager 1 is just 23h 32m 9.981s light seconds away.

          One way.

            • Jambone@lemmy.worldEnglish
              22 hours

              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.

              • swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                14 hours

                He was a dramatic actor up until he did Airplane! That’s one of the reasons he was cast in the role.

              • kalpol@lemmy.caEnglish
                19 hours

                Yeah for a 60s sci fi movie it’s pretty good

                • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                  14 hours

                  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!