Browsing: computer

How did a guidance computer with 4 kilobytes of memory, less than a modern greeting card chip, land Apollo 11 on the Moon in July 1969?

Saving Tips July 31, 2026

On 20 July 1969, about five minutes into the powered descent to the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin…

How did a single computer worm written by a Cornell graduate student in November 1988 crash roughly 6,000 machines and force the internet to invent security?

Saving Tips July 27, 2026

On the evening of 2 November 1988, a Cornell graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris uploaded a small C program…

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart sat before roughly 1,000 computing professionals in San Francisco and demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing and shared-screen editing in one 90-minute session, a concentrated glimpse of the interactive computer future later remembered as the Mother of All Demos

Saving Tips July 27, 2026

On 9 December 1968, Douglas Engelbart sat at a custom console in San Francisco and used a small pointing device…

In 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes wrote LAP6 for the LINC computer from her parents’ Baltimore home, testing an interactive operating system on a 250-pound machine in the living room and becoming the first known person to use a personal computer at home, twelve years before the Apple II reached buyers

Saving Tips June 8, 2026

In 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes was writing software in her parents’ Baltimore home for a computer that weighed about 250…

Every Apollo guidance computer that flew to the Moon had its software literally woven by hand at a Raytheon factory outside Boston, where women threaded copper wire through tiny magnetic cores to encode each bit as either a one or a zero, a process the engineers nicknamed LOL memory for Little Old Lady.

Saving Tips June 4, 2026

The Apollo Guidance Computer that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Sea of Tranquility in July 1969 ran…

In 1901, sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera pulled a corroded lump of bronze out of a Roman shipwreck, and it sat in an Athens museum for half a century before anyone realised they had found a 2,000-year-old computer that could predict eclipses 19 years in advance.

Saving Tips June 1, 2026

In the spring of 1900, a crew of Symi sponge divers en route to fishing grounds off North Africa were…

The computer that landed Apollo 11 stored its code in “rope memory” that was physically woven by hand by a workforce of women in a Massachusetts factory, a wire through a magnetic ring meaning one and around it meaning zero, so the program that carried humans to the Moon was literally knitted into being.

Saving Tips May 30, 2026

The lede above is true, and it is one of the stranger facts about the Apollo programme. The software that…