re: #336 Dangerman

I was looking up computers on NASA rockets, and while the flight software for the Apollo rockets truly was a binary program, it was a hardwired board, requiring worker, women, to essentially sew ones and zeroes on a grid to run.

It took eight weeks to weave the memory for a single flight computer. The computers in the command module and the lunar module were identical, but their programming was different, and the programs for each Apollo flight were also different.

While tedious, the work demanded attention, skill and experience. Raytheon found that out during Apollo when there was a brief strike in the mid-1960s that included the Waltham factory.

Managers and supervisors attempted to keep the Apollo computer assembly line going by sitting down to do the weaving themselves. According to Ed Blondin, a senior manager at the facility, “Everything they made was scrap.”

history.com