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She wrote all this code by hand to take humanity to the Moon (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/nextfuckinglevel@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 14 points 3 years ago* (6 children)

Amazing. Punch cards are before my time but did she have to plot out the code before creating punch cards? I'm wondering about the " by hand " part of it.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    I was a CS major in late 70s and used punch cards for Fortran programs. I’m guessing “by hand” meant writing the code with pencil/pen on paper and then typing up the punch cards for each line of code.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    As @hjeremy@lemm.ee noted, this was woven into core rope memory, not punch cards.

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