This scene was featured in a cool Lego set:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/women-of-nasa-21312

She looked like my wife.

(Posted with permission.)

(Oh also my wife is still alive, she’s still is/am, thankfully, and I will be devastated when she isn’t.)

That caption is not completely correct. That is the code that she and her team wrote, not code that she wrote by herself.

It would be absurd to think she wrote that amount of code by herself. It doesn't stand up to a moment's consideration. I can give you a couple of obvious reasons.

First, it would take anybody a long time to write that much code, but it was quite literally a space race. They simply wouldn't have one person doing something when a team could do it faster.

Second, that is all mission-critical life-or-death code. You have to suffer over every line of code to make sure that it isn't going to kill somebody. The last time I checked, which was admittedly about 30 years ago, in the space industry, a developer was expected to do something like 12 lines of code per day. Even if they could do more back then and each page was a day, which again, would be far more than acceptable for this type of code, that stack has got to be way over 20 years worth of work. She would have had to start when she was like 13 years old.

.. in good health.

Almost all of the men in my family didn’t make it it to 50 going back 3 generations..

No one of us

To add on, "worked" is an understatement. She was the one that coined the term "software engineering." One of the main founders of the field.

TIL she was still alive.

I forget that the Apollo missions ended while gen-x were just being born. It's not so long ago!

I know I did.

Turing, Hopper, Dijkstra, Hamilton. Always.