From the article:<p>&gt;Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the “Little Old Ladies,” threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible.<p>I was at a talk by Richard Battin, also of Draper on the Apollo program, a few years back. One of the stories he told was of a number of the Apollo astronauts visiting Raytheon (where the core memory was being &quot;sewn&quot;) and the general gist of the visit was &quot;be really careful with your work or these nice young boys could die.&quot;