NASA's last original Voyager engineer retires at 80 | Hacker News Reader

NASA's last original Voyager engineer retires at 80

money.cnn.com

What a great story. Quite heartening to find out about Zotterelli's accomplishments, after all, he started working on Voyager when he was 42. Goes to show, "senior" engineers are very capable of making noteworthy contributions. (In reflection of a recent HN thread about ageism in software industry.)

The article also points out the extreme importance of documentation, because we never know what systems will still be running, or programs still in use 40 years in the future. It's truly terribly wrong to "take secrets to the grave", knowledge should be shared, we all have a stake in it.

I fervently wish Voyager's secrets are recorded while there's still a chance, it's too important to just let it die.

A couple of years ago I tried to interview him to get some of what he'd worked on written down. Unfortunately, I was never able to get a reply.

It would be wonderful for someone to sit down and produce a video interview with him going through his work and the architecture of Voyager.

If anyone knows a good way to contact him I would be very interested.

I noticed that no comment from him was in the article. I guess he may be averse to media contact.

"Finding people who can do that are few and far between"

When I was growing up, we had to learn assembly to do anything meaning full on a C64. And 64k is all we had, and for the most part all we were ever going to get. How will the industry deal with people who can't hack/program at a low level?

Its kind of scary when you have people with that much knowledge and experience leaving the industry. Especially one as young as ours.

I always wonder what will happen with the next generations of programmers coming out of school - most of them get started with Python, Ruby or Java. And low level systems programming is mostly an after thought or an annoying class for most students.

Congratulations to Mr. Zottarelli and a great and important career. And hopefully he will write a book about his work to help us along.

I had an ex-electrical engineering girlfriend who studied assembly as a core part of her degree. I think the low-level is covered more than you think, not in software engineering but in electrical engineering where the focus is on building platforms (transistors, CPU, Ram, hardware and assembly) to enable software to be written.

Yes. Even part of my pretty standard CS curriculum included electrical engineering (breadboard to ALU), assembly (self hosted interpreter/vm) and language theory (C clone) courses. With a bit of time I or my classmates could build a computer from scratch, but the relevancy of this to my day job of many years as web and scientific programmer has been zero to minor. I think it gives me enough insight into many phenomena, but the lower, the less it is relative to making stuff actually happen for people. We are building up.

With the growth of any science and industry, there is depth of specialization. The overall expertise is not decreasing, it is increasing, and the breadth has to give.

I don't think the problem is that they cannot find anybody who can program assembly in general, but they use a very exotic, old architecture with very limited memory. So someone has to learn this specific architecture with apparently limited documentation (and a google search won't cut it). And on top of that in a very unusual and critical application i.e. if you brick the processor you have a real problem. If this was e.g. a modern run of the mill ARM processor, you can find a lot of qualified assembly programmers.

First off, this is a beautiful article. Reading about software/devops at NASA is beyond fascinating to me, and it's crazy some of the things these guys have to do; most devops are just shaking off their training wheels, and NASA is riding a rocket powered motorbike down a ramp and over 50 cars while changing the bikes tires mid-air.

But I want to reflect on something. The fact that this system is not maintainable outside of the last engineers lifetime is a failure of documentation and proper organization. I'll cut them some slack for launching a washing machine through space, but the maintainability failure is their fault; not simply the result of age or language age. Moving offices didn't help, but if you've just got papers everywhere that are so easily lost every time you move, that doesn't reflect well on the organizational front.

It also speaks to how approachable a codebase should be, and what the long term benefits of proper documentation are. You never know how long the codebase you work on will be operational. All engineers should self-absolve themselves of the hit-by-a-bus problem.

Still, I expect they'll learn from this. And with computers now it should be harder for them to actually lose things now. I just wanted to reflect on what the article meant to me.

It might be their fault, but everyone who worked on that project in software were the pioneers at the time. So they didn't have the processes or knowledge to even know to document things.

They weren't babes in the woods - processes existed even 'way back then'. They were a government project for heaven's sake! Other departments documented every iota of information about their projects (military, aeronatics, intelligence and on and on). Its amazing NASA got away with this crap for so long. I have no idea why.

"Its amazing NASA got away with this crap for so long."

This is unfair. The popular article we're talking about is trying to dramatize a milestone, but it does not say that his retirement threatens the spacecraft. It's being managed by training someone new. When you retire after many years of service, people will make laudatory comments, say you will be hard to replace (which will be true), and then move on.

Incidentally, I believe he's not fully retired, because he's still listed in the employee directory here. Maybe it's set for the current work week, which for him, ends Friday.

It probably isn't their fault. I don't think anyone has managed to keep all the documentation for a engineering project of this size maintained and organised for such a long time. The people who understand how the documents are organised leave or forget things, the documentation on the documentation goes missing or gets outdated if it ever existed, stuff is misfiled, etc. Computers don't help - there's no computer system with a lifespan long enough, and every migration is a chance to lose or misplace items.

It IS their fault. it's not a natural disaster, it's man-made. That said, I'm not trying to pants NASA: it's always about tradeoffs, and whats noting is that this is a tradeoff they made, and this is what happened. Nobody died, so it makes for a good learning experience.

It it clear that the system is not now maintainable? They assigned a younger engineer to work with the man, and "impossible task" could be an exaggeration for "difficult" or could mean "never as good as the original guy", both of which are different from "he can't do it."

Programming this thing should be an unique thing. Voyager 1 and 2 (and earlier Vikings) were not microprocessor-based. It was designed with custom-made radiation-hardened RCA CD4000, coupled with standard TTL ICs.

"Though NASA found a younger engineer who was brought on to work with Zottarelli for a year and eventually replace him, Dodd said it's an impossible task. No one will replace him,' Dodd said."

That's a lifetime of job security

> That's a lifetime of job security

Maybe only 10 years?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-far-can-voy...

It's an amazing career and an honor to push mankind to the farthest reaches of space. Maybe we all can stand up for a moment and clap for him and his colleagues for a job well done.

Wow. I have a PDP-11 manual with Voyager logos on it that I grabbed from a retiring physicist in the lab I used to work at – I guess I didn't realize that his retirement was part of life and reality where people move on :(

Cool manual though! I've been tempted to donate it to either the computer history museum or NASA AMES (where it seems to have come from), but I kind of feel like they have dozens of these already

I haven't dug them out in a while, turns out they're from Pioneer not Voyager, woops!

"Finding people who can do that are few and far between"

How will the industry deal with people who can't hack/program at a low level?

They'll just start hiring from the demoscene.

Is there still some kind of demoscene? Do people do that stuff still, or were you being ironic? Would love a link (if you're not being ironic)!

Yes, and it's pretty awesome to follow.

http://2015.revision-party.net/

Check out some of the old school demos. They are still squeezing more out of that old 6502 and various custom chips.

AFAIK yes, the demoscene is still quite active. There are contests every year, and new demos get written for recent or older hardware altogether.

See the recent 8088 mph [1] or more generally, the pouet website [2]

[1] http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all... [2] http://www.pouet.net/

http://www.pouet.net/ seems fairly active and as far as I know (I am not into the scene) it is THE website for demoscene stuff.

This is fantastic :) Thanks guys. I had an Amiga 600 when I was 10, but I didn't know anything about demos until much later. Wish I still had it :p

Indeed, and they achieve some amazing stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdG413nNkI

Salaries for those with low-level systems programming skills will go up, and that should get people motivated to learn what is necessary.

There are still plenty of people out there that can work at the low level, and young people that can work at low level too. I compare it to the beginning of CS to now. In the 70's a computer scientist was familiar with electronics, and a lot of very low level things that would be considered EE now. This was needed in the days where machines were bespoke, and coding was very bare metal. But then people built standardized hardware, and developed standard operating systems that allowed people to work with higher level languages and trust the low level to others.

This is still the case. I am familiar with assembly and X86 but I never work with it. I do not need to, there are people that work on that. That does not impair me, it is just that the world of tech has grown much larger and there is a lot to know where nobody can know it all. Some have the feeling that if you cannot work with assembly or write compilers or device drivers you somehow don't have your chops.

The skills that are "few and far between" are those wanting to work on a unique system where that knowledge is not directly applicable to today's less bespoke technologies.

> That does not impair me

Not understanding it, however, would perhaps have impaired you in the long run.

Low level programming is easier than many suggest, but at the same time more essential than many would admit. It's not that you have to practice it, but understanding it is important.

E.g. I can't help but be alerted of career programmers who have no grasp of basic things like memory pointers. This surprisingly often goes together with not understanding high level concepts like asymptotic complexity, explained away with the same argument that "you don't need it in real life, just call sort()". It's like a plumber who seems to follow the build code doing all pipework inclinations by the book, but fails to recognize the general principle that water flows downwards. It's painting by numbers at best, and religious practice at worst.

There is no room for magic if one is serious about their trade.

>> How will the industry deal with people who can't hack/program at a low level?

Assembly programming is still being taught as a EE/CS curriculum, so the younger folks know (some) assembly as well.

That said, not all programming jobs require a low level programming knowledge. Now why would a Java or Rails programmer have to know ARM assembly, for example?

We can leave those things to the experts :D

Kind of related, but what happens to the source code and designs of old spacecraft? Apart from Apollo, has NASA ever realeased any?

V'ger's latest Amazon purchase: God is Retired, by F'etzsche.

Non-sequitor! Does not compute!!

You had to have seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

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