Engineering

The Saturn V rocket that sent humans to the Moon used punch-card programming

The Saturn V, still the most powerful rocket ever flown, used a guidance computer with 4 kilobytes of RAM. Its programming used a core rope memory system where data was literally woven by hand into magnetic core fabric — a single bit was encoded by whether a wire passed through or around a magnetic ring. The software for each mission was programmed using punch cards and physically woven by teams of workers, predominantly women, at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory. The total computing power on board was roughly equivalent to a 1970s pocket calculator. It landed humans on the Moon six times.

Source: Mindell, D.A., Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (MIT Press, 2008)

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