
NASA's last original Voyager engineer retires at 80 - IndianAstronaut
http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/technology/voyager-nasa/
======
jrapdx3
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.

------
jgrahamc
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.

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

------
vparikh
"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.

~~~
meric
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.

~~~
Demiurge
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.

------
meesterdude
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.

~~~
makomk
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.

~~~
meesterdude
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.

------
emersonrsantos
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.

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nyfresh
"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

~~~
chrisan
> That's a lifetime of job security

Maybe only 10 years?

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-far-can-
voy...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-far-can-voyager-i-
go-4728025/?no-ist)

------
robinanil
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.

------
codezero
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

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

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

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.

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

~~~
InclinedPlane
They'll just start hiring from the demoscene.

~~~
paublyrne
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)!

~~~
qbi_
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...](http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-
emulators/) [2] [http://www.pouet.net/](http://www.pouet.net/)

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

------
eevilspock
V'ger's latest Amazon purchase: _God is Retired_ , by F'etzsche.

~~~
gopowerranger
Non-sequitor! Does not compute!!

~~~
eevilspock
You had to have seen _Star Trek: The Motion Picture_ (1979).

