MIT and the Apollo Missions #SpaceSaturday

The story of the moon landing is complex. A lot has been written about the NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo missions — but a great deal of the computer design and programming work was done at MIT. Here’s more from MIT:

The computer system and its software that controlled the spacecraft — called the Apollo Guidance Computer and designed by the MIT Instrumentation Lab team under the leadership of Eldon Hall — were remarkable achievements that helped push technology forward in many ways.

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In an age when most computers took up entire climate-controlled rooms, the compact AGC was uniquely small and lightweight. But most of its “software” was actually hard-wired: The programs were woven, with tiny donut-shaped metal “cores” strung like beads along a set of wires, with a given wire passing outside the donut to represent a zero, or through the hole for a 1. These so-called rope memories were made in the Boston suburbs at Raytheon, mostly by women who had been hired because they had experience in the weaving industry. Once made, there was no way to change individual bits within the rope, so any change to the software required weaving a whole new rope, and last-minute changes were impossible.

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• Source: https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/01/06/mit-and-the-apollo-missions-spacesaturday/