12 videos · 8 hr 7 minDebugging at a Distance
Hacker News loves a war story about software you can't touch, and spacecraft are the most extreme case. This playlist runs roughly in order of history: two ways into the Apollo Guidance Computer, the restoration of a real one, then Voyager's 1970s computers, a Lisp REPL on Deep Space 1, a visit to the antenna that still talks to Voyager, and the 2023 rescue of Voyager 1. It ends with the photo Voyager took on its way out.
Play all on YouTube- 11:21:22
Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer
TNMoC · Picked by 11 · 2021–2026The way in: Robert Wills explains the AGC and then walks through the Apollo 11 landing step by step, 1202 alarms included, and HN keeps calling it mandatory viewing.
- 21:01:42
34C3 - The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk
media.ccc.de · Picked by 9 · 2018–2025Once the landing story makes sense, Steil and Hessmann go through the whole machine layer by layer, from hardware to OS to mission software, which commenters call the most complete AGC talk there is.
- 321:04
Apollo Guidance Computer Part 1: Restoring the computer that put man on the Moon
CuriousMarc · Picked by 8 · 2019–2024Now you see the real thing: CuriousMarc and Mike Stewart open a privately owned AGC in a Houston hotel-room lab, the first episode of a series HN recommends whole.
- 449:03
Apollo Core Rope Memory (Apollo Guidance Computer Part 30)
CuriousMarc · Picked by 2 · 2023–2026Thirty episodes later, the team builds a reader to recover lost programs from core rope memory, which a commenter calls the deepest dive on rope ROM anywhere.
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27:58Build an electroluminescent glass panel display -- an Apollo DSKY
Applied Science · Picked by 2 · 2019–2023A maker interlude before Voyager: Applied Science rebuilds the astronauts' electroluminescent display panel from scratch, so you see the other end of the AGC too.
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40:05"Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager" by Aaron Cummings
Strange Loop Conference · Picked by 3 · 2021–2024Moves from 1969 to 1977: a Strange Loop tour of the three computer systems that still fly Voyager, and why they have lasted so long.
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1:10:43The Remote Agent Experiment: Debugging Code from 60 Million Miles Away
Google TechTalks · Picked by 1 · 2012–2024Ron Garret's first-hand account of finding a race condition in Lisp on Deep Space 1 through a live REPL in 1999, which HN cites in nearly every thread about remote REPLs.
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20:16How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe (PART 1)
EEVdiscover · Picked by 2 · 2017–2024Before the rescue story, see the other end of the link: EEVblog's Dave Jones tours the 70m DSS-43 dish in Canberra with its operations supervisor.
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13:01Pinging The Voyager 2 Probe (PART 2)
EEVdiscover · Picked by 2 · 2018–2023Inside the control room, with live spectrum displays of a signal that left the spacecraft about a day earlier.
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35:25Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024
!!Con · Picked by 4 · 2024–2026A short, lively version of the 2023 telemetry failure from someone on the team, covering 1970s architecture and documentation that had gone missing.
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1:03:45How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away
Flight Software Workshop · Picked by 2 · 2026The full engineering version for flight-software people: no simulator, a failed memory chip, and code relocated around it, which one commenter called mind-blowing reverse engineering.
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3:31Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
carlsagandotcom · Picked by 5 · 2011–2026The closer: Voyager 1 took this photo of Earth in 1990 on its way out, and HN commenters say they rewatch Sagan's three minutes about it every so often.