[ale] [OT] Mars Lander!

[JD]

On 08/06/2012 01:17 PM, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> IIRC...  The early Viking probes were running some sort of variation of
> AIX.  One of them got into software trouble after landing on Mars that
> threatened the mission.  Then they realized they had inadvertently left
> a debugging option enabled that allowed them to get into the probe and
> fix the problem remote.  It was the first interplanetary hack!  Well, at
> least the first one done by us humans at least.  :-P

Huh? Both Vikings were launched in the 1975 and had 6000-words of memory.
AIX was out in 1986.

That must have been an extremely early form of AIX running on a Honeywell 24-bit
CPU.