Google the woman who worked for nasa and wrote the entire code for the rocket that took us to the moon for the first time by hand. Like literally, if I remember correctly, the picture is just a stack of lined notebooks as tall as the woman who wrote it.
My dad was an electrical engineer that worked on the Gemini & Apollo programs. He actually worked at Draper Labs in Cambridge, MA which did a lot of work for NASA.
He likes to tell the story of a coworker he shared an office with. This coworker designed a lot of the circuitry used in the rockets, and back then it was all drawn out by hand on huge sheets of paper on drafting tables. This guy was also fairly short, so he’d practically stand on a stool to reach the upper parts of the drafting table. He’d draw up various circuits, have the papers duplicated, and send the duplicates off to NASA. He kept all the originals on his desk. When it was time to draw up a new circuit he just put down a blank sheet of drafting paper over all the other circuit drawings and start drawing the new one.
From time to time this guy would get calls from the NASA teams that were actually building the rockets. They’d say they were calling about a specific circuit, so this guy would start flipping through the corners of all the sheets of drafting paper looking for the right one. When he found the right one he’d duck his head under so he could get a good look at the circuit diagram while discussing it on the phone with the NASA people.
If he had to then he’d actually crawl onto the drafting table during a call. My dad says that more than once he walked into the office to find this guy covered by sheets of drafting paper with only his legs & the telephone cord visible as he talked to the NASA engineers.
Google the woman who worked for nasa and wrote the entire code for the rocket that took us to the moon for the first time by hand. Like literally, if I remember correctly, the picture is just a stack of lined notebooks as tall as the woman who wrote it.
Edit: saved you from the Google monster:
That comma in that text makes my brain hurt
My dad was an electrical engineer that worked on the Gemini & Apollo programs. He actually worked at Draper Labs in Cambridge, MA which did a lot of work for NASA.
He likes to tell the story of a coworker he shared an office with. This coworker designed a lot of the circuitry used in the rockets, and back then it was all drawn out by hand on huge sheets of paper on drafting tables. This guy was also fairly short, so he’d practically stand on a stool to reach the upper parts of the drafting table. He’d draw up various circuits, have the papers duplicated, and send the duplicates off to NASA. He kept all the originals on his desk. When it was time to draw up a new circuit he just put down a blank sheet of drafting paper over all the other circuit drawings and start drawing the new one.
From time to time this guy would get calls from the NASA teams that were actually building the rockets. They’d say they were calling about a specific circuit, so this guy would start flipping through the corners of all the sheets of drafting paper looking for the right one. When he found the right one he’d duck his head under so he could get a good look at the circuit diagram while discussing it on the phone with the NASA people.
If he had to then he’d actually crawl onto the drafting table during a call. My dad says that more than once he walked into the office to find this guy covered by sheets of drafting paper with only his legs & the telephone cord visible as he talked to the NASA engineers.
She didn’t write all of the code by hand. She led and worked with a team that did it.
It’s still impressive, but it wasn’t a solo job.