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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

Were engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now? It’s pretty unbelievable that these things still work. Or is there something systemic about how they were able to achieve so much so long ago with basically no computers to help.

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>Were engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now?

Were the 2006 sony santa monica programmers smarter then us when they delivered God of War 2 for the PS2 on its tiny resources?

Usually the constraints force you to become inventive and smart. Put a hard limit of 128 mb per tab on web browsers and suddenly both the developers of the browsers and the web developers will become extremely smart.

The over abundance of resources has made the majority of software engineers lazy. If we once again live in scarcity times - suddenly people will start to ask why we need 8 abstraction layers to do something.

I would guess they were quite smart bunch, but no superhuman - just people tasked with extremely challenging task, trying to jury rig something on the edge of possibility. My guess is that they took their tasks more seriously and to heart.

> The over abundance of resources has made the majority of software engineers lazy.

I don't think "lazy" is the right word, it's just that cheap hardware makes most optimizations not worthwhile. Why spend weeks optimizing an application, costing thousands of dollars and potentially introducing a lot of complexity bugs, when paying 50$ instead of 5$ for a server is also an option? Not to mention the importance of time to market and the time value of money (even if the server cost will armotize, spending the money later might be worth it).

There obviously is some laziness and useless complexity in our industry, but a lot of it simply is the rational choice. We all love the ingenuity of assembler-hacking the last few bits of performance out of the CPU, but for most usescases, this is simply wasted effort.

They had lot less resources and knowledge to estimate the right amount of resilience for achieving the mission goals and erred on the side of cautions.

You can see something similar happening in bridges, weight per meter load has come down considerably since the 60s because material understanding is much more advanced and they meed less margin for the same safety factor.

Our understanding of physics has also gotten much better, for example our understanding of tensegrity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurilpa_Bridge

> The Kurilpa Bridge is a multiple-mast, cable-stay structure based on principles of tensegrity producing a synergy between balanced tension and compression components to create a light structure which is incredibly strong.

Delighted to see this here — the Kurilpa Bridge is less than 50 meters from my front door and is something to behold each time I get the chance to use it.

That must be such a treat. As an American, I'd love to visit it one day.

There was much less overall complexity (and capability). These engineers interacted directly with capacitors and circuits to accomplish their tasks. Integrated circuits enable a lot of modern society, but it also segregates engineering between fabrication time and everything afterwards.

I find that more analogue / mechanical type machines even more amazing in someways. Like how they say it ‘decided’ to switch to its backup radio. How are those decisions made on such basic hardware? I guess thinking mechanically is just a very foreign concept for me mostly making software

Golden NASA budgets might have helped…

The Voyagers weren't exactly cheap, but by NASA standards they were made on a shoestring budget because all the money at the time was being diverted to development of the space shuttle.

NASA missions still routinely overperform. Curiosity's been operational on Mars for a good 12 years now.

Most of our car engines run at a small fraction of their capability, even when going at highway speeds. Most servers have a 15-25% utilization to handle failover situations. If you have a beefy as fuck set up with extra wide tolerance margins, things can last for a very long time. Car engines with a chamber that’s essentially containing explosions still end up running for decades with very little maintenance. Well, some longer than others. This is also true for consumer electronics/appliances. You still have things going just fine from almost a century ago. Yes, some things fail faster than others and the designers were aware of limitations and trade offs, but most components continue working. What would be wise in this case is to look at how the voyager was designed for reliability to understand why it hasn’t completely gone off the rails. Meaning, what are the common anpproaches and why do they fail, and why doesn’t the voyager fail. What does it do that’s different than the usual method. Lots to be learned there but I don’t think the people were wizards, they probably dealt with very brittle things and had tight specs and knew how to design certain parts to very close to perfect. The manufacturing of parts plays a huge role in reliability. If you know you can achieve better manufacturing output but it is a matter of cost, then that’s easy - government can pay whatever. But if you don’t know, then that’s a harder situation to be in and that’s guess work. But if you have a capacitor that’s normally 20% off rating that you’d buy in a store, and you know you can get it to be down to 1% off or even less from rating, then you go for that with everything you’ve got. And all parts are made with as wide of tolerance as you can get so that as they degrade, things can still work. Easier said than done, but there it is. Things will eventually break and not work. But for now, Voyager has bought time, quite literally.

They weren't affected by DEI nonsense yet.

It's not nonsense. Many of the radio receiver setups made use of diversity or dual-diversity configurations. Also, transmitter and receiver blocks from different manufacturers were wired in switchable primary/backup configurations.

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