What happens when something breaks, and there's no one left to fix it?
Auld Lang Syne
The passing of the first generation of programmers brings to light the predicament of what to do when software outlives its practitioners.
An article about the Voyager Deep Space Probes circulated recently on Facebook; after 40 years of flight, management was looking for programmers who knew Fortran, COBOL, and assembly language. The call for programmers proficient in these "ancient" languages garnered a lot of laughs from the younger programmers in our community but demonstrates a future problem that is just beginning to appear.
The one remaining original programmer on the Voyager project, Larry Zottarelli, is now 80 years old. Remember that Voyager has been flying for about 40 years, and its design really began perhaps five years before it was manufactured, tested, and launched, when Zottarelli was still fairly young. Probably a lot of the people working on Voyager did not think it would still be working 38 years later and would not believe that it might still be operating well into the 2020s. NASA needs programmers who can keep the software "alive."
This is not the first time I have run into situations of ancient hardware and software, but it is one of the most interesting because the hardware cannot be upgraded.
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