> It seems the young engineers, growing up in an era of unlimited storage, didn’t know how to tackle the problem.
Starting off with some ageism and general cluelessness of your own doesn't help. If they wanted a "young engineer" to generically optimize data storage, I would be at least half-competent, and could give them the names of several engineers far younger than 77 who would be excellent at such work in general.
What neither I nor virtually any other engineer, young or old, would know, and what the engineer who helped build the thing would, is anything about the specific equipment and code in use on Voyager. This is specialized knowledge, just like a lot of the knowledge young 2013 NASA engineers have.
It is equally as beneficial to employ those engineers to modify the systems they built as it was to employ Lawrence Zottarelli to modify the system he built. Age is unrelated.
Starting off with some ageism and general cluelessness of your own doesn't help. If they wanted a "young engineer" to generically optimize data storage, I would be at least half-competent, and could give them the names of several engineers far younger than 77 who would be excellent at such work in general.
What neither I nor virtually any other engineer, young or old, would know, and what the engineer who helped build the thing would, is anything about the specific equipment and code in use on Voyager. This is specialized knowledge, just like a lot of the knowledge young 2013 NASA engineers have.
It is equally as beneficial to employ those engineers to modify the systems they built as it was to employ Lawrence Zottarelli to modify the system he built. Age is unrelated.