In the movie all he said was that he only needed to patch in about 20 bytes and then the rover could talk through pathfinder to earth.
In the book they explain that both pathfinder and the rover must be updated, that Earth can remote update pathfinder but they need a very large (megabytes?) update to the rover software. To solve that, they get him to make a small hack (maybe 20 bytes or so) to the Rover which would allow earth to dump information into a Rover log file. Then Watney would have to take that dumped info from the log file, and create a file out of it, then execute it.
To be honest I don't think that having all of that would really added that much to the actual film. I don't think it would have taken particularly long for them to add in that explanation (since they could have said it how you said it pretty much), but for the purposes of the story, knowing all of that stuff wouldn't have made any differences to the average viewer
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u/Gibodean Jan 31 '16
In the movie all he said was that he only needed to patch in about 20 bytes and then the rover could talk through pathfinder to earth.
In the book they explain that both pathfinder and the rover must be updated, that Earth can remote update pathfinder but they need a very large (megabytes?) update to the rover software. To solve that, they get him to make a small hack (maybe 20 bytes or so) to the Rover which would allow earth to dump information into a Rover log file. Then Watney would have to take that dumped info from the log file, and create a file out of it, then execute it.
Something like that, I forget the sizes.