[divbzero]

Sounds like they didn't even have perfect records of what software was deployed while they were trying to resuscitate the spacecraft? Because software deployed over the years to the same limited memory overwrote previous versions of software. Eventually they managed to get that memory dump (from a fail-safe and/or plain luck) which probably gave them a clearer picture of what they were dealing with.

[rcxdude]

They didn't even have perfect records of what hardware was deployed. They had to risk assess what version of the instruction set it was running!