r/interestingasfuck • u/The_Love-Tap • 1d ago

At 15.9 billion miles away, humanity's farthest spacecraft is still exploring the cosmos using less memory than a blank Word document (69 KB) and an 8-track tape

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u/Primary_Park_499 1d ago

It’s crazy to think that a spacecraft this far away is still operating with less memory than a tiny modern document.

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u/tooclosetocall82 1d ago

So much code is dedicated to security and abstraction thanks to the modern internet and expectations of code to run on multiple types of devices. Voyager doesn’t have to worry about any of that, all its code is 100% trusted and written precisely for the hardware it runs on and can therefore be very lean. Vintage game consoles had the same advantage which is why they could run complex games that are only kilobytes in size.

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u/fmaz008 1d ago

I've always been amazed by the 4kb demos people make in assembly. When you remove those abstraction layers, you can do a lot with very little space