NASA signed the first Apollo contract for the computer, before there was a rocket or a crew. Its program was woven by hand into copper and ferrite by former watchmakers and textile workers at Raytheon, and its software division was run by Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term software engineering to make the hardware men take her seriously. When Eagle's computer threw a 1202 alarm three and a half minutes into the descent, what kept it flying was a scheduling rule Hal Laning had written four years earlier.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Margaret Hamilton, Hal Laning, Charles Stark Draper, Jack Garman, Steve Bales, Gene Kranz, Don Eyles, Neil Armstrong, The Raytheon rope weavers
- The idea it builds
- Core rope memory (a wire through a ring is a 1, around it a 0) and priority scheduling that sheds low-priority work under overload.