They kept blowing up on the pad -- or just after liftoff. Ultimately, the Army had to step in to modify a Jupiter-C rocket to put the JPL-built Explorer satellite into orbit.

Launched in 1958, Explorer 1 remained in orbit until 1970.

This had 60 terminals and a lot of other peripherals attached to it. We had to clear errors in the system by poking zeroes into specific memory locations.

The process you were SUPPOSED to use was to calculate the offset for the location you wanted to use, convert it from decimal to octal, then poke the octal into the address. Naturally, this took quite a while to do so our programmer and the four system operators decided to sit down and calculate out all the addresses then put them in a book for easy lookup. One fine day the main programmer for the system (there were two of them, we had one and the other was in a unit in West Germany) was in town when I had to do this. "Oh, you're so smart!" No, just persistent, and I showed her the book. "Can I make a copy of this? (The other unit) doesn't have anything like this!"

Voyager just keeps going, wonderful.