"The twin robotic spacecraft launched in 1977, the same year as the Apple II, the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet, making the spacecraft the patron saints of the modern computer age. By the time Voyager's primary mission ended with Voyager 2's 1989 Neptune encounter, earthlings had the 80486, the Gameboy and the Apple Macintosh Portable. As Voyager 2 was nearly three billion miles (4.7 billion kilometers) away at that point, however, hardware upgrades were ruled out by the cost of delivery."
"Despite such overlap between their histories, Voyager didn't use a microprocessor - the first such marriage was between Intel's 4004 and Pioneer Venus in 1978. Yet Voyager 1's computer issue in 2023 and the subsequent epic eight month fault finding and interstellar firmware update, as space vlogger Scott Manley so aptly called it, revealed some intriguing parallels between the 48-year old spacecraft and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, in particular the Spectrum 128, launched in 1986, the same year Voyager 2 was speeding over Uranus' clouds."
The twin robotic spacecraft launched in 1977 alongside early personal computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET. The spacecraft include three computers, each duplicated for redundancy, handling navigation, communication and instrument control. The Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) was a novel, high-speed design using 8k 16-bit words of dynamic RAM to manage planetary encounter data. Voyager did not use a microprocessor; the first spacecraft to do so was Pioneer Venus in 1978. Voyager 1 experienced a computer issue in 2023 that required eight months of remote fault finding and an interstellar firmware update, revealing parallels with consumer machines like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128.
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