Remarkable

Here’s a remarkable story:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080509/ap_on_hi_te/shuttle_recovered_data

A company in Minnesota was able to recover data from a hard drive that was in Columbia when it disintegrated during reentry.

That’s remarkable all by itself, but it’s not the remarkable part of the story.

The remarkable part of the story is that the Space Shuttle—the most complex machine ever built—runs hard drives with a capacity of only 340mb.  My jump drive has more storage.  Hell, my Ipod has more storage.  My notepad has more storage—the 200 page one, not the 150 page one.  Seriously, wow.

A close second, is that NASA runs programs in DOS.  Described in the article as “ancient”, I remember running DOS on my old Apple IIc.  I remember “run program.exe” commands on my old high school computer classes WAAAY back in the early 90s.  DOS?  Seriously?  Not some kind of in-house unix or linux based system?  I suppose running a DOS system does prevent viruses and such, since hackers would be using equipment and software fabricated this century.  There’s no way they’d be running a Mac OS, what with all the virus problems they’d have if they tried to invade another planet (a la Fourth of July).

Although, the Space Marines should seriously consider investing in some Mac based viruses…