"Fortran, assembly programmers ... NASA needs you – for Voyager
With its last generation of space-race engineers hanging up their slide-rules, NASA is looking for someone fluent in Fortran and other Cold War-era languages.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics, the manager of NASA's Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the last original crew member has left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.
Launched in 1977, the two Voyager crafts rely on mid-70s hardware powered by purpose-built General Electric interrupt processors. After 38 years in space, the two probes are currently on the outer fringes of the Sun's influence, heading into interstellar space.
Though most of the instruments onboard the two probes have been deactivated, both are still able to maintain contact with Earth and will continue to do so into the 2020's, until their onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators no longer function.
In the meantime, NASA needs engineers capable of interacting with the 1970s-era technology, a skillset that includes knowledge of both Fortran and assembly as well as the ability to command a machine with just around 68KB of total memory. ( AtW's comment: Enough memory to include a few games as well
)
"Although, some people can program in an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to," Dodd was quoted as saying.
With high-level languages now the standard for developers, knowing how to fluently code in assembly has become a specialized skill, as has fluency in dated languages such as Fortran. While obscure, the skillset is potentially lucrative. Along with NASA's aging fleet of spacecraft, many businesses still rely on ancient languages such as Fortran or COBOL for specialized tasks and critical infrastructure"
Source: Fortran, assembly programmers ... NASA needs you
With its last generation of space-race engineers hanging up their slide-rules, NASA is looking for someone fluent in Fortran and other Cold War-era languages.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics, the manager of NASA's Voyager program Suzanne Dodd said the retirement of the last original crew member has left the space agency with a shortage of people capable of communicating with the 40-year-old craft.
Launched in 1977, the two Voyager crafts rely on mid-70s hardware powered by purpose-built General Electric interrupt processors. After 38 years in space, the two probes are currently on the outer fringes of the Sun's influence, heading into interstellar space.
Though most of the instruments onboard the two probes have been deactivated, both are still able to maintain contact with Earth and will continue to do so into the 2020's, until their onboard radioisotope thermoelectric generators no longer function.
In the meantime, NASA needs engineers capable of interacting with the 1970s-era technology, a skillset that includes knowledge of both Fortran and assembly as well as the ability to command a machine with just around 68KB of total memory. ( AtW's comment: Enough memory to include a few games as well
) "Although, some people can program in an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to," Dodd was quoted as saying.
With high-level languages now the standard for developers, knowing how to fluently code in assembly has become a specialized skill, as has fluency in dated languages such as Fortran. While obscure, the skillset is potentially lucrative. Along with NASA's aging fleet of spacecraft, many businesses still rely on ancient languages such as Fortran or COBOL for specialized tasks and critical infrastructure"
Source: Fortran, assembly programmers ... NASA needs you
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