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
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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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.
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.
As @hjeremy@lemm.ee noted, this was woven into core rope memory, not punch cards.
Oh that sounds neat. I'll go look that up as i haven't heard of core rope.
Alright that was cool. Thanks for the link. I barely understood how it works but sort of got the concept. How far we have come. Wow.
There was a keyboard involved. They don't use a hole puncher lol.
I was just grasping at straws. Kinda wanted to know more as it sounds like a good story.