The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
I wish (and don’t) I could work on something that had a dependency of “design it once because it’s relatively inaccessible after its go live.” I’ll def check out the documentary.
[1] There was, however, one game I worked on where they had to pull the boxes from stores (delivered, but not yet for sale) and swap out the disk in order to release a critical fix that was discovered too late. Fun times (:
But yes, my understanding is it was quite expensive and the publisher was none too pleased (:
The issue was that one programmer used an unauthorized system call to make the disc drive spin twice as fast, as they thought it was a great way to resolve some of the data streaming issues the game had. And yeah it worked - but after few hours of playing it would kill the GameCube. It wasn't really noticed because no one tests the game on actual discs right until actual gold master is made(usually), and then when the devkits died it was considered a random hardware fault and Nintendo just replaced them.
I just checked the one commercial game I developed and there are two patches I can see released by Eidos for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_(1994_video_game)#Rece...
Yep - at my least job I worked on three products, only one of which is still running.
The job before that still has their main product running, so I guess I'm at 50% (not including my current job).
>>NASA's Voyager Mission: Remastered [4K] https://youtu.be/M62kajY-ln0