Computers have really improved since the 1970’s. And one way you can tell that is by the amount of memory available for programs. It seems to be a fact of life that computer programs will expand to fill up all available memory and then some. And a real life example of this is the Viking one lander.

On Nov 11, 1982 a signal was sent to the lander to load some new software. This was going to improve the ability for the lander to charge its batteries. But the program was a little bigger than any previous program. No problem we would just write over some old data.

Old data… Like the program that Viking used to calculate where the earth is… So it knows where to point its’ antenna… So it can radio information back to earth.

It kinda lost our email address.