💻 Codepublished 2w ago
Early space flights navigated using core rope memory sewn by textile workers
Before silicon microchips were reliable enough for space, NASA used core rope memory on the Apollo Guidance Computer. Software wasn't flashed onto drives; women from local textile factories physically wove copper wires through magnetic ferrite rings. Passing a wire through a tiny ferrite core represented a binary '1', while bypassing the core represented a '0'. Because human hands threaded every byte, engineers affectionately nicknamed the flight firmware 'LOL memory'—short for Little Old Lady memory.
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