The software that landed men on the Moon was not loaded onto the Apollo Guidance Computer so much as woven into it, with women at a Raytheon plant threading wire through or around thousands of tiny magnetic rings by hand, one pass for a one and one miss for a zero, until the whole program was a physical textile

The software that landed men on the Moon was not loaded onto the Apollo Guidance Computer so much as woven into it, with women at a Raytheon plant threading wire through or around thousands of tiny magnetic rings by hand, one pass for a one and one miss for a zero, until the whole program was a physical textile

The software that guided Apollo 11 towards the Moon did not reach its computer as an electronic download. Once the program had been written, tested and approved, much of it had to be manufactured. At a Raytheon facility outside Boston, women passed fine copper wires through or around tiny magnetic cores. A wire threaded through a core produced a binary one. A wire routed around it produced a zero. The approved program became a dense physical obj…