Elaine Denniston is an American lawyer who supported the

Apollo program The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which Moon landing, landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo followed Project Mercury that put the first Americans in sp ...

as a

keypunch A keypunch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards at specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator. Other devices included here for that same function include the gang punch, the pantograph punch, ...

operator. She supported the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) team working on the software to control both the

Apollo command and service module The Apollo command and service module (CSM) was one of two principal components of the United States Apollo (spacecraft), Apollo spacecraft, used for the Apollo program, which landed astronauts on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. The CSM functi ...

Early life and education

Denniston was born in

Roxbury, Boston Roxbury () is a Neighborhoods in Boston, neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Roxbury is a Municipal annexation in the United States, dissolved municipality and one of 23 official neighborhoods of Boston used by the city for ne ...

in 1939. She graduated from Girls’ Latin School, a college preparatory high school located in Boston, in 1957.

Apollo program

In 1965, Denniston was hired by

Kelly Services Kelly Services, Inc. (formerly Russell Kelly Office Service and Kelly Girl Service, Inc.) is an American multinational office staffing company. The company places employees at all levels in various sectors including financial services, informati ...

, an employment agency. She was assigned to MIT Instrumentation Lab (now Draper Laboratory), and was hired directly by the lab within a few months of starting. Denniston joined the GNC team developing the software to approach and land on the surface of the moon. Denniston worked as a

operator, taking the developed source code and entering it onto the keypunch cards. According to Denniston:

I punched the cards that eventually were turned into the program for the guidance system for the Apollo project. Punching cards is punching cards whether you’re in an insurance company or working on the Apollo project. The programmers would give me 11-inch by 17-inch sheets of paper. They would write the program in blocks. My job was to keypunch it onto the cards. Remember, direct access to computers didn’t happen back then.

Denniston was known for catching errors made by the programmers, such as a missing symbol or closing parentheses. At the time, the punchcards would be processed overnight, and an error could waste the entire run. Denniston left MIT after two years due to lack of opportunity for advancement. She cited training someone who eventually became her boss in the department. She was told that they needed someone to come in for support, no matter the time of day. She was the mother of two at the time, and felt this was the reason she was overlooked for advancement: "I think looking back that was the only time I felt being a woman was against me, so to speak".

Later career

Following her departure from the MIT Instrumentation Lab, Denniston returned to school and graduated from

Radcliffe College Radcliffe College was a Women's colleges in the United States, women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was founded in 1879. In 1999, it was fully incorporated into Harvard Colle ...

in 1973. She went on to attend

Boston University Law School The Boston University School of Law (BU Law) is the law school of Boston University, a Private university, private research university in Boston. Established in 1872, it is the third-oldest law school in New England, after Harvard Law School and ...

. She has spent her career in the public sector, working for the district attorney's office as well as the city of Boston. In 1981, Denniston helped found the group Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys, a

nonprofit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

bar association A bar association is a professional association of lawyers as generally organized in countries following the Anglo-American types of jurisprudence.

dedicated to helping Black women attorneys. Denniston retired in 2012.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Denniston, Elaine 1939 births 20th-century African-American lawyers African-American women lawyers 20th-century American women lawyers 20th-century American lawyers 21st-century African-American lawyers 21st-century American women lawyers 21st-century American lawyers Apollo program Boston University School of Law alumni Living people People from Roxbury, Boston Radcliffe College alumni