Poppy Northcutt and her colleagues did not directly program mission-control computers; IBM personnel entered their programs, and parts of the code were sometimes lost in translation.
Notes on verification
Confirmed by multiple independent sources including a direct National Geographic account and Northcutt's own interviews (EDN, Innovation & Tech Today), consistently describing TRW's role in designing trajectory programs versus IBM's role in inputting/running them on mission control computers, with occasional translation errors.
Sources
- Inside Apollo mission control, from the eyes of the first woman on the job (nationalgeographic.com)
- https://innotechtoday.com/poppy-northcutt/ (innotechtoday.com)
- https://www.edn.com/frances-poppy-northcutt-the-first-woman-at-nasa-mission-control/ (edn.com)