Re:Decluttering low-Earth orbit: It's time to tidy up space
by hnarn on Monday January 18, 2021 @05:00PM
(#25827197)
I have to say that the assumption of a hobbyist satellite in 1970 to be able to run UNIX is pretty amusing, considering (Wikipedia):
> In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000 (equivalent to $165,000 in 2019), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.
I think itβs safe to say that the biggest issue with launching computers running UNIX into space in 1970 probably was not the lack of a standardized time stamp :-)
> In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000 (equivalent to $165,000 in 2019), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.
I think itβs safe to say that the biggest issue with launching computers running UNIX into space in 1970 probably was not the lack of a standardized time stamp :-)