She wrote all this code by hand to take humanity to the Moon
She wrote all this code by hand to take humanity to the Moon
Margaret Hamilton, NASA's lead developer for Apollo program, stands next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969
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Wouldn't it have worked better if she wrote it into the computer? 🤔
The title is a bit misleading, this is a printout of the code that she indeed wrote into the computer first.
She also had a team of engineers who I'm sure deserve at least some of the credit. This title is bunk.
But...but...someone on the internet told me that it was all handwritten and lost. So now we can't go back to the moon!
If it was printed later or written on punch cards... how much code are we actually looking at?
Each punch card/ has 80 characters.
So way less than you'd imagine, but this is also late 60s machine code (even lower than assembly), and it was mathematically proven to be correct.
Still assembly. Nasa's Apollo Guidance Computer Assembly specifically. A punch card is to translate the code into 1s and 0s that, each line of which, constitutes an instruction that is fed to a punch card reader. However, that is not what this was made for. This code didn't went on to a punch card, it went to an instruction loom. The system's read-only memory consisted of a weave of ferromagnetic rings and copper wire that is called rope core memory. As in, Nasa paid people to carefully physically weave by hand the individual 1s and 0s.
Afaik, the loom thing was just for the computer on the Apollo itself, but I could be wrong.
Each punch card/ has 80 characters.
So way less than you'd imagine, but this is also late 60s machine code (even lower than assembly), and it was mathematically proven to be correct.
I know you're likely joking, but for those who don't know: back then, code was written onto and stored in paper punch cards.