When Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko landed a top-secret MiG-25 at a Japanese airport in September 1976, American engineers tearing it down expected to find titanium and microchips, and instead they found vacuum tubes, rivets popped by hand, and a stainless steel airframe so heavy it could only fly fast in a straight line.June 4, 2026
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 the small hours of 2 September 1859, a telegraph operator in Portland, Maine disconnected his batteries because they were throwing sparks, and then discovered he could still send a clean message to Boston using nothing but the current the aurora was pushing through the wire above his head. Saving Tips June 1, 2026 On the morning of 2 September 1859, telegraph operators along the American East Coast began arguing with their own equipment.…
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…
