My aunt was a human assembler at NASA (2015)

My Aunt worked did Maths at Houston and worked on the Gemini and Apollo projects as a programmer, eventually starting her own company.<p>She too has passed now, and despite being very interested in space as in studying it for a degree I never got to talk with her about what she did.<p>From what I have read women programmers seemed to be quite rare at NASA, but perhaps not as much.

The title is a bit misleading and doesn&#x27;t do the aunt any favours IMHO :)<p>Because the title sounds like somebody else wrote the programs in assembly, and her job was to translate assembly instructions into machine code. But according to this sentence, it was &quot;proper&quot; programming, manual translation to machine code was just the last step:<p>&gt; They’d give us these formulas, and we’d have to translate the mathematics into instructions for the computer.<p>...and as &quot;hardcore&quot; as it sounds to directly hack machine code into the computer, it&#x27;s also tedious, slow, error prone and above all: boring. This is how I started too (albeit in the 80&#x27;s on a home computer), and there&#x27;s nothing interesting about it except that I still know a couple of Z80 opcodes (how useful!). Once I got my hands on an assembler, productivity skyrocketed (the &quot;productivity jump&quot; between writing a program in machine code and assembler code with a proper macro assembler is bigger than going from assembly code to C (or any other high level language).

Speaking of assemblers, I visited NASA Huntsville in the late 70s and watched a small group of women in a clean room string tiny ferrite toroids on wires.<p>They were still assembling core memory at that time.<p>So, NASA was loading hand assembled code into hand assembled memory.<p>They were doing it the old fashioned way - but the memory was rad hard, which was one of the reasons for staying with that technology.