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Comment by neilfrndes | Hacker News Reader

I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

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Anyone know which SUN workstations those techs were using to "talk" to Voyager?

They seem to be running some sort of Unix yet look quite new ish with their widescreen LCD Displays.

this -- fascinating -- document about porting the code for the Pioneer/Voyager Cosmic Ray Subsystem[0] does not specifically mention which _workstations_ were used, but the doc is hand-dated to be 4/15/93.

so for servers maybe SPARCservers and SPARCcenters and if they had good budget Sparc 10s for workstations? probably had a ton of IPXs and IPCs around the place.

this doc from february 1995[1] "a study of workstation computational performance for real-time flight simulation" used a variety of SPARCs as well as other workstations from HP, SGI, IBM etc. the Sun workstation benchmarks are not good!

[0] https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/Pioneer_Software_port_...

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19950020821/downloads/19...

(edited to add 2nd link, derp)

In a brief moment in the trailer for the documentary linked above there is something that looks like an Ultra 24, 27 or 45. That would make it an Intel or AMD based workstation, but they reused that cabinet for a lot of models with minor variations. I believe they had one with an UltraSparc CPU as well.

I'd like to say Sun SPARCstation Voyager[0], but I have nothing on it but the name and its LCD screen. In the trailer some UltraSPARCs can be seen, as noted by others

[0] https://www.oldsilicon.com/sparcstation-voyager

Thanks for mentioning this, hadn't heard of it and looking forward to watching!

Thanks for mentioning this doc. Just watched - it was fascinating and bittersweet.

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