"The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory."
Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pursuit of modernity: on modern systems direct memory access is discouraged if not prevented by the underlying OSes, and this hack would not have been possible.
The modern equivalent to this would be an embedded system with an RTOS, where you do get full control of memory, because you are the OS. We just have nice abstractions on top of that for the most common use cases, since you very rarely need that precise of control over system timings or memory allocation.
Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pursuit of modernity: on modern systems direct memory access is discouraged if not prevented by the underlying OSes, and this hack would not have been possible.