Those who are no longer quite so young, like me, may still remember the launch of NASA's two Voyager space probes in 1977.
The goal of the mission was to explore the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which was successful.
But that was not the end of the mission. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have meanwhile left our solar system and have been sending data from space ever since.
This is only possible thanks to the technical ingenuity of NASA's scientific team, as the space probes' energy supply is finite and functions have to be deactivated.
All this is happening over a distance of around 25 billion kilometers, with the space probes traveling at a maximum speed of 17 km/second away from Earth. The transmission of signals between Earth and the space probes takes more than 18 hours.
Some of the program's employees have spent their entire professional lives working on the two missions. No one could have imagined that the Voyager program would run for nearly 50 years and counting.
1976 was the year
the Canon AE-1 was introduced.
Microprocessor technology was used in an SLR for the first time. New manufacturing methods and the use of plastics created a durable SLR that is still popular today and keeps on running.
Even the Canon engineers could not have imagined at the time that their AE-1 would stand the test of time so well. Minor problems such as the well-known Canon squeak can be remedied.
And so both
the Voyager space probes and our SLRs move through time, long beyond their useful life, and are kept in working order by dedicated enthusiasts.
Even functions are no longer available because a part has failed, they continue to work.
Repairs are feasible to a certain extent, and where that is not possible, improvisation and ingenuity come into play.
Who could have imagined all this 50 years ago?
