Giovanni Cassini was picking apart Saturn's rings in 1675, spotted the gap running through them, and three centuries later we bolted his name onto about five and a half tonnes of spacecraft and threw it at the planet. Fuel, lander, instruments, the lot — call it a loaded minibus. Far too heavy to go straight there. The Titan IVB in the photo, that whole white flood under the gantry against a black sky, couldn't do it alone.
So in 1997 Cassini took the long way round: past Venus twice, back past Earth, out by Jupiter, stealing a little speed off each one like a kid working the swings. Seven years in transit, arriving 2004. Saturn's up in the southeast by mid-evening right now, a steady yellowish dot that won't twinkle. Try around nine.
The itinerary reads nicely if you lay it out: Venus in '98, Venus again and Earth in '99, Jupiter at the end of 2000, Saturn in the summer of 2004. Every leg booked years ahead, and it kept to them. I'd have signed off that schedule.
The brain in that minibus was a MIL-STD-1750A, a 16-bit design already old news in 1997, picked because its behaviour was known cold. Good thing they could send up new software during the cruise — seven years is a long time to live with a bug you shipped at launch.