Margaret Hamilton and her brilliant team developed the crucial Apollo guidance computer software by having expert seamstresses literally weave the binary code into core rope memory by hand.

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Margaret Hamilton and her brilliant team developed the crucial Apollo guidance computer software by having expert seamstresses literally weave the binary code into core rope memory by hand. Copper wire threaded through a magnetic ring represented a one, while wire bypassing the ring represented a zero, meaning the software that safely landed human beings on the moon was basically high-tech knitting. A single mistake by the textile workers meant a fatal software bug in the vacuum of space, which is an agonizing level of pressure for a manufacturing job. It puts modern software engineering into hilarious perspective when you realize today's highly paid developers will crash an entire banking app just because they missed a semicolon!

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Margaret Hamilton and her brilliant team developed the crucial Apollo guidance computer software by having expert seamstresses literally weave the binary code into core rope memory by hand.

A closer look

A bigger world.One discoveryat a time.

Keep exploring

The Space Shuttle had less code than your microwave

The tangled code keeping critical systems alive

Why software updates take hours and change almost nothing

Giesse and other computer engineers in the early days of graphical interfaces modeled the concept of "scrolling" directly after ancient physical papyrus scrolls.

Thousands of new malware variants appear every month

Why Excel still thinks 1900 was a leap year

A bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.