[ale] [OT] Mars Lander!

[Michael H. Warfield]

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
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
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