Submission + - Antique Viking Technology (smh.com.au)
sea_stuart writes: COMPARED with the latest electronic wizardry, they are fossils from the age of the techno-dinosaurs.
Yet the bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. Housed at the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, the 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits.
Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometres from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometres from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques.
"The Voyager technology is so outmoded," said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, "we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/thirty-years-tr acking-faint-whispers-from-space/2007/08/31/118806 7368154.html
