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
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Wouldn't it have worked better if she wrote it into the computer? ๐ค
The title is a bit misleading, this is a printout of the code that she indeed wrote into the computer first.
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.