Do you think we can help NASA into the new millenium?

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For Old Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

NASA needs parts no one makes anymore.

So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet — including Yahoo and eBay — to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive.

Officials say the agency recently bought a load of outdated medical equipment so it could scavenge Intel 8086 chips — a variant of those chips powered I.B.M.'s first personal computer, in 1981.

When the first shuttle roared into space that year, the 8086 played a critical role, at the heart of diagnostic equipment that made sure the shuttle's twin booster rockets were safe for blastoff.

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I would think that they could upgrade different parts of the system and still keep it going. We can network a 386 running DOS with a Windows XP machine. Why can they mix hardware?

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Dennis
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The same question was posed recently on another technical forum and the answer given stated that there was years of proven reliability of the hardware and software used in these older systems.
Whereas newer hardware is unproven by time so is classed as unreliable on mission critical based systems.

Among the things I heard they were looking for were 8" floppy drives. You can't tell me that those are more practical than a modern 3.5" 1.44mb drive. And it shouldn't be that hard to make the new ones work, one way or another. An adapter plus a 3.5" drive would fit in the area where an 8" drive used to be.

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Dennis
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You can't tell me that those are more practical

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Nope not more practical but time proven reliable.

When they were first putting the space station up there I had read that they were using 386's onboard.

The reason given is not only their reliability, but because the architecture is relatively broader than newer chips (not as many circuits crammed into the chip), they would be more resistant to the effect of cosmic rays and other such things out there in the vastness of space.

Dave :)

a 486 /8 megs of ram doesnt seem to interfere much with tv radio reception