Watch the Blinking Lights
I just thought this story was interesting. I guess there is a market for niche hardware guys still. Think about whats gonna happen when the NCC-1701 Enterprise finds ”Vger” in a couple hundred years. 
COMPARED with the latest electronic wizardry, they are fossils from the age of the techno-dinosaurs.
Yet the bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. Housed at the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, the 1970s hardware is now our world’s only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system’s outer limits.
When NASA’s Voyager probes set sail they were the most sophisticated spacecraft ever built. But that was 30 years ago.
…
Today Voyager 1 is humanity’s most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometres from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometres from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques.
“The Voyager technology is so outmoded,” said Tidbinbilla’s spokesman, Glen Nagle, “we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them.”
That is because the ageing probes can only chat at a sluggish 32 bits a second, far too slow for modern computers.
“The computers look like the stuff out of the old sci-fi movies, with blinky lights and big colourful buttons,” Mr Nagle said.
From Sydney Morning Herald Online
