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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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[–] 10 points 3 years ago (7 children)

The title is a bit misleading, this is a printout of the code that she indeed wrote into the computer first.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    If it was printed later or written on punch cards... how much code are we actually looking at?

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

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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