Voyager Spacecraft and Fortran 5

Combine this with low pay and perceived (and probably realistic) low advancement options.

At some point you start thinking about "yeah, that would be great, but I have mortgage to pay off" and the like.

I too thought this way and I figured there were probably a lot of engineers who were comfortably well-off and would be happy to relocate and work for free on Voyager.

However, although there would be great emotional satisfaction working on such a unique project (not as great as in it's heyday though), there would not be an equal amount of intellectual satisfaction. Don't get me wrong--the current Voyager engineers are performing amazing intellectual feats. It's just that the project is nursing along the spacecraft in their final few communicating years as the power levels run out. There is probably very little programming done except to work around failing hardware. Non-emergency concerns probably mainly focus on which remaining subsystems to power down and when.

Also, the time frames for operations are really long. I believe some of the current Voyager staff work only part-time on Voyager and younger engineers probably don't want to sit around twiddling their thumbs for a good amount of time while waiting for results. (Neither do older engineers for that matter!) The quote about attracting younger programmers is from Matsumoto's paper; she also gives this account of a 2010 memory problem:

"For example, when the V2 experienced a bit flip in the FDS [computer] in 2010, it took about two weeks to recover enough to receive the engineering data, and another two weeks to receive the science data. It took another four and one-half months to adjust the timing delay caused by the anomaly and resynchronize the CCS and FDS clocks. Realigning the baseline events to the regular schedule had to be delayed even longer due to other activities competing for the resources."

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2016-2415 (PDF)

We've seen a similar situation more recently with recovering from the failed FDS memory block. So, although enthusiasm is important for a Voyager programmer, patience is a virtue!

I love learning new languages, and working on something this incredible would be absolutely amazing.

Certainly more worthwhile than modern web dev.

I'm guessing maybe it's the hiring side that wants people who already have $x number of years experience? it reminds me of the guy who wrote angular(?) and wanted to apply for a job but couldn't, because it required 8 years of experience and this was only 5 years after he wrote it.

I've tried to get the source code too, but end up going around in circles between NASA and JPL :(

Dusty Decks? First thing that popped into my head when I saw your name. I bookmarked it on one of my web pages back in 2004. Dang, between that and your other works, a computing rock star in our midst!

Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/

Thank you! Perhaps like you trying to get the source code, I was frustrated at the lack of information and began writing a letter seeking more information to Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager. I couldn't find an address to send it to, but I figured "JPL, Pasadena, California" would get it to someone who could look up her mail stop. Fortunately, I didn't need to complete the letter as things began to fall in place thanks to different bits from others on the internet and to some obscure 40- and 50-year-old papers I managed to track down. (I am grateful to the shady websites that host scientific papers for the latter. I understand the concern of professional organizations about preserving their publication rights, but at some point the information is effectively lost.) Thanks again for the kind words!

The piece documents that at least two manufacturers (Data General and Univac) marketed their extended Fortran IV compilers as "Fortran V" -- but it doesn't say whether they actually extended Fortran IV the same way. "Fortran V" wasn't the name of any official standard; the ANSI standard which more or less documented Fortran IV was officially Fortran 66, and ANSI's next version was Fortran 77.

Author here--thanks for the compliment! I too had never heard of Fortran 5, which is why it kept bugging me every time I heard it mentioned in connection with Voyager over the past few years.