NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s
Summary
The article analyzes NASA's Voyager spacecraft software, explaining that the onboard systems run assembly language on purpose-built hardware with limited memory, maintained by an aging team. It reframes the common narrative from a simplistic 'unreadable code' view to issues of fragmented documentation and institutional memory, highlighting maintenance challenges for long-running, mission-critical systems.