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“....You don’t “code up” data in FORTRAN. ....”

YES I KNOW THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!

I didn’t feel like writing a technical treatise as a reference work to my question!

I am trying to figure out what these “Significant Figures Did”?

And in my undergraduate days I had to digitize graphs by hand as far as I was concerned I was “coding it up”! I also had to get into the main frame a U-Haul of punch cards XFS data. Again as far as I was concerned I was “coding it up”!

So what did these people do that I should genuflect toward them?

I just want my question answered!

They probably just ran through computations with a slide rule or log tables. I seriously doubt they planned or specified the trajectories. The old 7090s and 1108s cranked out piles of computations related to trajectories. Maybe they just looked for anomalies in that output. We would have heard about them long before now if the matter was more significant than that.

"Coder", when used as slang for a programmer, is one of my pet peeves. Sorry to trigger one of yours.