Every Apollo guidance computer that flew to the Moon had its software literally woven by hand at a Raytheon factory outside Boston, where women threaded copper wire through tiny magnetic cores to encode each bit as either a one or a zero, a process the engineers nicknamed LOL memory for Little Old Lady. (opens in new tab)

The Apollo Guidance Computer that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969 ran on software that had been physically sewn into its memory by women sitting at workbenches in a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. Each one of them threaded thin copper wires through, or around, tiny ferrite […]