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

  • Blamemeta@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Blamemeta@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Afaik, the loom thing was just for the computer on the Apollo itself, but I could be wrong.