How Massachusetts made the Apollo 11 moon landing possible

July 16, 2019

In the mid-1960s, Elaine Denniston was a young woman with a high school education and excellent typing skills. So the temporary agency where she worked gave her a plum assignment: the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she entered thousands of lines of software code onto paper punch cards — the USB drives of the era.

She knew the work was related to the US space program, but for the first couple of years the magnitude of the project didn’t quite sink in.

“Who knew it was of national significance back in ’67, ’68?” Denniston said. “In ’67, ’68, it was a job.”

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