https://www.fastcompany.com/90363966/the-guts-of-nasas-pioneering-apollo-computer-was-handwoven-like-a-quilt
Citando:
"If the internals of the Apollo computer itself needed to be hand sewn, so be it.
And so, like the lunar rover wheels and the parachutes, the circuits and programs of the Apollo flight computers were also woven by hand, by women at a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. They sat at sophisticated looms, using long needles with wire attached to them instead of thread, carefully weaving the wiring that was the programming of the computers.
The software was, in fact, hardware.
It was an astonishing process that was tedious yet required absolute attention and precision. Every single 1 and 0 in the computer’s memory required a wire in exactly the right place. A single mis-wired strand meant the computer’s programs wouldn’t work properly—and might fail at some critical, potentially disastrous moment.
The women who did this work had, in fact, been recruited from nearby textile factories. The memory holding the programming for a single Apollo flight computer—for the entire mission—was a total of just 73 kB, far less than the memory many emails require today. Yet it took dozens of women in Waltham eight weeks to assemble it, meticulously, by hand."
(...)
"The Apollo guidance computer was the first operational computer to use rope-core memory. By the time U.S. lunar modules starting landing on the Moon, the technology had moved on to the much easier to handle—and much cheaper—computer chips and floppy disks that dominated computing for the next several decades.
So the Apollo flight computer was not only the first computer of any significance to use handwoven rope core memory. It was also the last."
