Some Thoughts about Pioneer 10 Era - LRK -
Hi Steve,
You are most welcome.
Will continue to try and keep connected with what is going on towards space and pass to those interested. Will see how the lunar-update list holds up now that I am posting through a non NASA firm. Will be looking up from outside and will have to make sure folks don't think I am speaking for NASA. Will lose a little of the name dropping aura. :-)
When I walked across the runway in 1983 from my Navy VP9 retirement to NASA had to get a map that showed the other half of Moffett Field. I walked in on Pioneer 10 leaving our local solar system and watched Don Bass's sounds of Pioneer playing out of a Vic 20 using Basic to play sounds for 1's and 0's that had been captured from a 1200 bit block in 1/8 of a second and played out over 12 seconds (the time it took to gather a 192 bit frame at 16 bits per second). Black and white checker board display on a little 12 inch monitor. TV cameras zeroed in on the one monitor, ignoring all the other big science displays, and wires from the press hooked into a Vector pin board. Wow! Sounds of Pioneer. I later did much the same thing with Pascal on a DOS PC with 4 colors and a display of the high speed data block in HEX and Sounds of Pioneer playing out the PC speaker. We put two PC over in the kids learning center and piped live data from Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 12, then going around Venus.
We had a CARD PUNCH and CARD READERS upstairs in the Operations area and at that time 3 Xerox sigma 5's with 48 K of memory and big wheel that was called a Rapid Access Device (RAD) that would give you access to 5 meg of data with a row of read head flying over the surface. You had to spin it up before you could lower the read heads or you got one of the disk crashes we used to hear about.
Later we took out two Sigma 5's and put in one Sigma 9 with a whopping 128 K bytes of memory. When I re-wrote the Pioneer 10 down-link telemetry to run on the Mac Quadra 950 (still working until yesterday) I would have to go into the big binders of code to find the values for some of the polynomial coefficients that were used to covert binary data bits to analog values because in the software documentation you might find a big TBD, to be determined. Well since Pioneer 10 was already far out in space, someone must have determined those values.
When I would test my program, would look on the Mac and see if the numbers for battery voltage or bus current or temperature - matched with what was displaying on old BEE HIVE TERMINALS that had Intel 8008 chips for their logic processors.
Now how do I take you to the Moon on the Internet?
Where do folks want to go?
What do they want to see?
How do they want to participate?
Here to serve and look up with you all
Larry
8:34:57 AM 
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