[ale] [OT] Mars Lander!

[Jeff Hubbs]

I'm imagining the $7500 Interplanetary Option.

On 8/6/12 10:33 PM, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 17:52 -0400, JD wrote:
>> 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.
> Hmmm...  Maybe I have the wrong lander then.  There was one that made it
> to the surface and got into trouble due to a software glitch (and, no,
> I'm not referring to Spirit and the "mars rover reboot recovery"
> situation) and they had to exploit and unintended backdoor in the
> machine to regain control  Maybe Pathfinder but maybe not.  Too long ago
> and the memory is too dim at this point.  I do remember the reference to
> AIX because it seemed so funny at the time thinking that was the LAST OS
> I would have expected on the beast.
>
> Regards,
> Mike
>
>
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