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. 
Short URL: http://bit.ly/crNamSCOMPARED 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.
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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
What do they mean that “That is because the ageing probes can only chat at a sluggish 32 bits a second, far too slow for modern computers.” A computer can go as slow as you want it to. I think what they mean is that it is too hard to buy off-the-shelf equipment to maintain these things, and they don’t want to spend the effort/time/MONEY to replace rooms of rack mounted boards discrete parts with a couple custom built card. I have seen situations were entire rooms of equipment from the the 70’s/80’s can be replaced by a single PC. You can buy off-the-self programable development boards and cobble on a few parts to interface to your irreplacable parts such as the antenna. We do that sort of stuff all the time.
These days they have completely emulated old DEC and CDC machines that will run on single PC. They will even convert the hardware commands to something modern hardware can tolerate.