In 1968, the engineers building the Apollo Guidance Computer wove its software into physical memory by threading copper wire through tiny magnetic cores by hand, and the women who did the stitching were called 'Little Old Ladies' on the factory floor even though they were holding the only program that could land a man on the Moon.

In 1968, the engineers building the Apollo Guidance Computer wove its software into physical memory by threading copper wire through tiny magnetic cores by hand, and the women who did the stitching were called 'Little Old Ladies' on the factory floor even though they were holding the only program that could land a man on the Moon.

Every Apollo Guidance Computer that flew to the Moon carried software that had been stitched together by hand, one copper wire at a time, by women working at a Raytheon factory in Waltham, Massachusetts. The program was not loaded. It was not written to a disk. It was physically threaded — wire going through a tiny iron ring for a 1, wire going around it for a 0 — until the entire flight program for Apollo 11 existed as a woven object, dense as …