Antique Voyager Technology

sea_stuart writes with a story from the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia. It is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. Here's a little background on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. "The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked... [T]he 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. 'The Voyager technology is so outmoded,' said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, 'we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.