The Weavers: Memory and the Moon

In 1965, engineers were building a computer to fly men to the moon. It had to survive a rocket launch and the vacuum of space. It could not be erased by a power failure, a hard landing, or anything short of physical destruction. They needed to make the code permanent. They needed to weave it.

In this episode

• Hilda Carpenter - MIT technician who assembled the first magnetic-core memory plane
• The Raytheon weavers - Textile workers and watchmakers recruited to encode Apollo's computer
• The Fairchild Semiconductor plant - Where Navajo women built integrated circuits so men could walk on the moon

Episode Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Those 2 Saints"
  • "Evening Drum"
  • "No History Should Be Silenced"
  • "Behind the Mask"

Additional Reading

CuriousMarc. (2019). Core memory explained and demonstrated [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/AwsInQLmjXc

Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous circuits. Computer History Museum. https://computerhistory.org/blog/indigenous-circuits/

Rankin, J. L. (2022, February 18). Core memory weavers and Navajo women made the Apollo missions possible. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/core-memory-weavers-navajo-apollo-raytheon-computer-nasa

Shirriff, K. (2019). Software woven into wire. Ken Shirriff's Blog. https://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-rope-and.html

Stark, L. (2018). Hilda wove all those wires [Zine]. https://www.liza-stark.com/projects/zines/hilda.html

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (2017). "Hear my voice" artist profile: D.Y. Begay [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wmz5rf1NU

Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world. 

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