The electronics on this ship got underway 47 years ago but were probably built several years before then. Definitely not built by Boeing.
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Yes, quite a feat. Was built by the Jet Propulsion Lab which is funded by the taxpayers and managed by Cal Tech. Smart people. I went on a tour years ago and it was very interesting.
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I agree that Voyager’s continued performance is amazing-- built to work for a long, long time. It seems like there was a golden age of technology where if you didn’t mess with it, it just kept on working. My closets and shelves are full of technology that works fine, but is out of date.
I do have to defend my father’s honor, however, with regard to the Boeing comment. He designed wing structures at the Lazy B for 42 years starting in 1951. Sure, bad management tends to eff things up and kill people, but prior to the purchase of McDonnell Douglas, the company had an unassailable record of safely transporting what has to be billions of people aboard thousands of aircraft. They did so by developing some pretty amazing and durable technologies along the way. The B-52 for crying out loud: the last one was built in 1962, and it’s still flying and doing its job well. Sure, they changed the wires and light bulbs and computers and the CRM114, but the air frame is solid. That’s remarkable. Then you can just go down the list of airplanes that set world standards.
Even their experimental stuff that didn’t wind up being purchased by the military was amazing. Look up the YC-14: It was a high technology STOL type transport that could carry an Abrams tank. Boeing built two of them, but they fell victim to bad timing and politics. It was so cool that the Soviets saw it and tried to build a few, as they do. Sorry, I got triggered a bit, but I think Boeing definitely could have built that space probe. Back in the day.
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I can agree with this.
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I’m thinking 47 years ago things were simpler. Today they would be much more complicated and easier to “break”. It will be said on a future “Stardate”, “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier to stop up the drain.” 
(nice nod to Dr. Strangelove!)
“Goldie! How many times have I told you guys I don’t want no horsin’ around in the aircraft?”
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My first sea-going unit was still using vacuum tubes. WWII technology.
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interesting stuff, I tend to think Boeing and mc d should of stayed separate. there are a lot of fine aircraft companies that got bought out or merged, (who built the lunar module?) at our rate we’ll only have one car maker and one airplane company in a few more years.
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I have a 25 year old TV in my living room. First one I bought for my first apartment, open box at that. It’s still chugging. Gets a funny buzz some days and the picture is starting to go a little, but still got life left in her.
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Takes me back to the few times I got to use Loran A. In filthy weather using DF bearings and using wet paper echo sounders was routine crossing a line of bearing with the 100 fathom line was routine. The echo sounder was a step up from the sounding machine I sold as scrap to a nice man in Singapore. When we got Radar it took as long to warm up as it did to raise steam.
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Sure. In my first ship the gyro had its own room that was bigger than mine, and I’ll never forget that odd electrical/rubber/sweat smell that came from stuffing my face into the radar face piece. Kids these days will never know.
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The gyro room. Also the telephone gear room. Rubber mats on the floor. I remember scrubbing the mats before the CO’s inspection. Hungover and nodding off as i scrubbed and the other EM laughing at me.
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My first ship offshore, away from inland river boats, was a seismicgraph vessel. The room that held the GPS unscrambling computers was bigger than any state room on board. Better air conditioning too. Then one day the prez at the time made the gps signal unrestricted but the client, PGS, kept the giant computers anyways just in case.
About the Voyager 1, as someone mentioned in the linked CNN article comment section, I always thought the Voyagers & Pioneer are some of humanity’s greatest feats. I’ve wondered how much dust it will pick up going through the Oort Cloud for 300 years & if 40,000 yrs from now when its traveling past the star AC+79 3888 will it be the center of a giant comet? That thing is traveling through space at 38,000 miles per hour. Absolutely amazing imo.
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… but did you ever use Consol in mid Atlantic?
Before access to Transit (never mind GPS), and we didn’t have Loran (-A or -C), and Decca was expensive lease/licence-only equipment.
Days without sky ,so counting that dot/dash sequence for a fix, half-convergency tables and all that. But there was something comforting about tuning in to the Bushmills signal - thoughts of a nice hot whiskey…
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We never had Decca in the naval vessels I sailed in apart from 2RD Decca we used surveying . There were two slave stations, each in a trailer with another trailer for the generation plant and a caravan for the three ratings . It was a sort after billet, set up on isolated farmers paddock with a Landrover to go into town to pick up, ahem, supplies. The ship was the master station.
It wasn’t until I sailed with an oil company that we had Decca and with the Suez Canal closed we could use the South African chains as well as the Gulf and Europe. I did use Consol a couple of times and I learnt the theory of it but I can recall very little of that today.
Bushmills, now there’s a happy thought.
DEi hires make doing anything good today very hard
Does that explain the 737max?
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As second mate I had an alarm for the gyro in my room. A Sperry Mk 8?
Boy, I wish I could remember the model number, but that was a long time ago. It was likely a Sperry of WWII vintage, black, and about the size of a wringer style washing machine.
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I had no idea anyone had any knowledge of a wringer washing machines besides my incredulous American bride when I introduced her to a New Zealand laundry way back when. Your recollection of the size was spot on.
In 1977 we started doing the Oregon Offshore race. First few years down the Oregon Coast & back to Astoria, later Astoria to Victoria as a feeder for the Swiftsure race. We’d of course heard of loran but nobody down at our level (¾ tonner/35’ loa) could afford that in those days. Few sailing yachts under 50’-60’ even had radar. So we used to cross Fathometer readings with bearings off of an AM RDF tuned to coastal commercial broadcast stations for which we’d located their transmitters on the chart!! (Also tuned LF radio “beacons” as I recall, more accurate but there weren’t many of them) it was in a metal box with a compass rose on the top and a rotatable ferrite rod used to find the max signal. It was so crude that any half intelligent DR position was almost always more believable! Given the time out of sight of land (at 5-6 knots made good if you were lucky!), there was always a lot of discussion amongst the watch about where the hell we were! Lots of “seat of the pants” guessing with occasional possible meaningful data thrown in (“I’m sure I saw the loom of Destruction Island Light right abeam at 02:45!!”). When I got my first GPS I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!! I think those days before GPS were when we started saying we navigated by the Fugawi method. Whedda Fugawi I think his name was.