I recently came across the most amazing piece of video footage while watching a documentary on the technology used during the Apollo missions of the late 1960’s.

That era was a little bit like an alternate decade of the 21st century that sort of just showed up in the middle of the 20th century. In addition to tremendous leaps in aviation and space-flight that decade gave us advances in medical, material, and computer science.

To put it in perspective, the working memory of the navigation computer for the Apollo missions was just 72 kilobytes! Things that we take for granted now had to be invented from scratch, including interrupt driven multi-processing algorithms and reliable data storage.

For a fascinating look at how the latter was solved, watch this video:

For more about this amazing and lost technology see the Wikipedia entry: Core Rope Memory

On a separate note, this is a fascinating and possibly forgotten example of diversity in coding.