[ekianjo]

Totally agree. This article smelled ignorance in every single line, and saying Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit. Simple changes could mean faster answers for plane crashes is akin to complaining that my TI Calculator in the 80s was more powerful that the Voyager's probe processor. Different purposes, different specs, different constraints. The person who wrote this piece is definitely not an engineer and has no scientific background whatsoever, as far as I can tell.

[akiselev]

Fun fact, Voyager launched before the first RAD hardened CPU [1] processor was available and the Voyager electronics are more akin to a ton of expensive FPGAs and ASICs that have a bunch of error correction and redundancy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802