Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and are two of a handful of spacecraft that have entered interstellar space. Two others (Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11) were launched several years earlier are now derelict and out of communication with the Earth, while New Horizons is much newer, having been launched in 2006.

The Voyager series have onboard computers that are beyond ancient by modern standards. There are a set of interconnected systems, which combined – combined! – have 32KB of memory. From this, they power an array of scientific instruments and communicate with Earth. They are custom hardware, not off-the-shelf electronics, and hold the world records for the oldest continuously-running computers, having been powered-on nonstop since 1977. The CPUs operate at about 250Khz, which is four times slower than a Commodore 64.

There isn’t really an operating system per se, but rather a set of different integrated circuits to do specific things. The design is more like a constellation of Arduino boards than a Raspberry Pi.

One interesting thing is that there’s no encryption or authentication per se.