94: Hand Stitched Computers

Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm Amy Barton and I'm trace Kerr and it's time for a brainstorm. And this brainstorm is brought to you by Chaz Kerr who I'm excited. Yes. He came to me with something that he'd heard on NPR. He was like, did you know that the Apollo missions, those were to the moon, uh, in the mid 1960s. He's like, did you know that there were women who were stitching the computers together? Exactly what I said, except he told me quite early in the morning I think. And so it was more like, well, huh. So in the mid 1960s, computer chips and memory, there was hardly anything like that. Okay. Use your computers needed punch cards. And if you don't know what those are, you're younger than us. Um, yep. Bigger than an index card paper card. And it had holes in it. They were punched out. And if you wanted a computer to do anything, you had to put those punch cards in there. Speaker 0 00:59 And the computers were the size of refrigerators. Okay. They're big. Well, in order to do these Apollo moon missions fly computers needed to work instantly and they needed to be small. So they were trying to design computers down smaller and smaller. The one for the Apollo mission flights, they were the size of a briefcase. Wow. That is significantly, significantly smaller. And the way they made this happen, Apollo computers were miles ahead of their time and they were the first computer of any significance to use what's called integrated circuits. So you've got hardware and software, your hardware is programs that are wired into a computer and it's just going to do it. Your software is like an app that you would download and put on. Okay. So the work in order to make these new computer circuits was super precise and it had to be done by hand. Speaker 0 01:47 And so somebody was like, you know what we need is seamstresses. I would never have thought that. I'd be like, we need surgeons. But same kind of handwork. Yep. And so they recruited the seamstresses and these women went to work at the Raytheon factory and they would take copper wire super thin and thread it onto a needle. And then with their giant magnifying glasses, they were sewing thin wire through the center of a ring shaped magnet. Ha. And so if it went through the magnet, that's a one. And if it went next to the magnet, that's a zero. And if you know anything about computer programming ones and zeros is the language of computers, right? As they were stitching what they were stitching was the actual program, like a trajectory or something like that that the computer had to follow. So they had to be precise, right. Speaker 0 02:37 No mistakes. Wow. Each of these things that they were making were 73 kilobytes of memory. That's less than a microwave oven. Yeah. But it had 589,000, 824 wires that had to be placed. Exactly. That is incredible. Yeah. We'll post a picture of this. It's about the size. Um, like a really large iPhone. It looked like maybe it's slightly bigger than that. And you know, these are all hand stitched. It took them approximately eight weeks to do one. Can you imagine if you're like, I'm having an off day folks while we're recording. There is a lot of tape on the floor today. You cannot have an off day in that job. No, I don't want her a zero. Oh, I'm going to have to go back and and string all of that. Yeah. Oh my goodness. The precision involved. Well and think about the fact that you know these, these women, cause it was all women had to know if I messed this up, someone could die. Speaker 0 03:31 Yes. A lot of people could die. You know this thing could come in too. Hot. Lot of responsibility, very detailed work. Well, here's the interesting thing. This is what caught Jazz's attention in the mid 1960s there was a strike at the Waltham factory. People weren't getting paid enough money, this kind of stuff. So these seamstresses or making these things, they step off the job because there's a strike and the engineer's in charge who were men were like, no big. We'll just get the engineers to do the weaving. It can't be hard. Women can do it. And so they started doing these things. Well, why? The time the strike was over, the women came back and they were like, we have to throw all this out. No, because it wasn't garbage. No, it wasn't good at all. I mean, even the engineers, you know as it, as they're like, okay, we've made this and they pass it up the chain. They were like, we can't use this. What are you doing? I know. I just made this myself and it's worthless. So that's my brainstorm. I love your brainstorm. Yay. We're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcast, and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. Teresa and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored.