DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover

A very good read for those that didn't know what happened.
"The problem, Denise said, was in the file system the rover used. In DOS, a directory structure is actually stored as a file. As that directory tree grows, the directory file grows, as well. The Achilles' heel, Denise said, was that deleting files from the directory tree does not reduce the size of the directory file. Instead, deleted files are represented within the directory by special characters, which tell the OS that the files can be replaced with new data."
Be sure to check out the last paragraph its pretty cool.

Related Web URL: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1638764...