4 ms·
Definately apophycral - from the bbc article linked in the first ycombinator article: The rope core memories would become know as "LOL memory" after the "littl
by demallien 17y ago
Definately apophycral - from the bbc article linked in the first ycombinator article:
The rope core memories would become know as "LOL memory" after the "little old ladies" who knitted together the software at a factory just outside Boston.
These ladies would sit in pairs with a memory unit between them, threading metres and metres of slender copper wires through and around the cores.
"It's an extremely time-consuming process and it meant that the programs had to be finished and fully tested months in advance," said Mr Eyles.
- 10ren 17y agoI got some details wrong, but it's basically right. Dijkstra spoke to Joel Aron (not Eyles), "head of IBM's Federal Systems Division which had been responsible for the software of the moonshot". It wasn't specifically in the lunar module, but somewhere in the 40,000 LoC. However, the bug was that the moon was repelling; and it was found by accident, 5 days before launch. See Dijkstra say it in person, at 15:00 in this interview (context starts at 13:40): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video.html (I haven't linked directly to the 300MB download). Great interview BTW (dutch with subtitles).