The computer that landed Apollo 11 stored its code in "rope memory" that was physically woven by hand by a workforce of women in a Massachusetts factory, a wire through a magnetic ring meaning one and around it meaning zero, so the program that carried humans to the Moon was literally knitted into being. (opens in new tab)

The lede above is true, and it is one of the stranger facts about the Apollo programme. The software that ran on the Apollo Guidance Computer, the small machine on board both the command module and the lunar module, was not written to a disc, a tape, or any other storage medium that could be […]