Browsing: computer

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…