She too has passed now, and despite being very interested in space as in studying it for a degree I never got to talk with her about what she did.
From what I have read women programmers seemed to be quite rare at NASA, but perhaps not as much.
Because the title sounds like somebody else wrote the programs in assembly, and her job was to translate assembly instructions into machine code. But according to this sentence, it was "proper" programming, manual translation to machine code was just the last step:
> They’d give us these formulas, and we’d have to translate the mathematics into instructions for the computer.
...and as "hardcore" as it sounds to directly hack machine code into the computer, it's also tedious, slow, error prone and above all: boring. This is how I started too (albeit in the 80's on a home computer), and there's nothing interesting about it except that I still know a couple of Z80 opcodes (how useful!). Once I got my hands on an assembler, productivity skyrocketed (the "productivity jump" between writing a program in machine code and assembler code with a proper macro assembler is bigger than going from assembly code to C (or any other high level language).
I thought she was assembling humans. Which, admittedly, would have been badass.
They were still assembling core memory at that time.
So, NASA was loading hand assembled code into hand assembled memory.
They were doing it the old fashioned way - but the memory was rad hard, which was one of the reasons for staying with that technology.
