Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
wrote:
As a bit of trivia, Reed Solomon encoding was invented without a way to
decode it. That's what you get when you let mathematicians run wild.
For absolutely nothing of any value other than bragging rights, name
the guy who invented the decoding scheme for Reed Solomon. [Hopefully
this isn't wikied someplace. I did one class in grad school on error
detection and correction, and it was a pain in the ass if you get into
the theory. Implementation is quite simple.]

It makes sense. The encoding software had to be ready to put into a probe
before the launch date. Once it was up it could not be changed.

Decoding software was another matter. Since they had years, maybe even decades
to decode the data, and it did not have to be real time, they could continue
to work on it.

All they had to do is not loose the tapes. :-(

Geoff.


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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
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I'm not sure what you mean by the "probe". The deal with Reed Solomon
is it is a non-binary code, which was a big deal at the time. The
buzzword is Galois mathematics. There wasn't any hardware that could
handle the code when it was invented.