It's funny how much this attitude has changed so much over the years. Now engineering is seen as menial work and the programmers are the real men and rockstars.
The vast majority of companies that work with physical things, like silicon designers/fabricators, auto makers, manufacturers of capital equipment like machining tools and lab equipment, energy companies, agricultural machine suppliers, hardware conglomerates like GE and Samsung, and on and on, still view (for the most part) software as the red headed stepchild, a necessary evil because their hardware has gotten so complex.
I'd imagine it's a bit different for the (giving a very generous estimate) 1% of developers who do work that is all of: challenging, difficult, and important, on a regular basis, but that's not me, or the overwhelming majority of people making pretty damn good money writing software.
I apologize for the errors, I'm on iOS and it's difficult to check the output of copy & paste.
Her name is the very first one in the original documentation: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
I love reading old stories about how the final frontier was (and is) being won.
Just one example:
A few weeks before the launch, the Navigator Command Module Pilot, Jim Lovell, spent a few hours practicing on the earth-horizon sextant simulator at MIT. He consistently identified the “horizon” about 20 miles above the real horizon. Great! Jim Lovell could be calibrated and his bias number loaded in the flight computer.
In the same vein as this article, I am always deeply moved watching Dr. William Widnall's lecture on Apollo's guidance, navigation, and control:
Yeah, but one has to admit, the Apollo Guidance Computer had way more gravitas any other computer since or before!
