Margaret Hamilton has died
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
Tangential: the software documented in the books next to her were likely developed with a level of rigor that consumer software can only dream of, per the seminal article on similar matters: https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
Like it wouldn’t even be describable as a “rescue itself” if the response was simply “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show an image without JS enabled and doesn't link directly to it either. I'm guessing you mean the pic here: https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...
In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...
I don't think it justifies your claim; there's nothing in the historical sources about masculinity, just irresponsibility. It's probably true that women were not allowed to be as irresponsible as the guys who screwed up in this case, but that's not because of those guys' understanding of masculinity. It's because the sexist culture of the time afforded fewer opportunities to women, in particular, cutting them less slack for misbehavior. With a less sexist culture, we could have seen Margaret Hamilton's computational fluid dynamics project stymied by irresponsible monkeying by women instead of irresponsible monkeying by men. With a more sexist culture, we would have seen Margaret Hamilton unable to get her grievances redressed because she was a woman, and the midnight wiring club would have continued interfering with officially sanctioned users until one of them was a man.
rest well pioneer.
Edit: this may or may not be true. From what I can find it's probably a combination of both.
IIRC she was running the simulation side of the lab that produced the AGC and LEM guidance software at the time of Apollo 11, then the AGC side, then the unified lab when it was reorganized in 1970.
> In the early days of this project, software was treated like an adopted child and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering, and was thought of as art and magic, not science. I have always believed that art and science were involved in its creation, but at the time most people thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to legitimize software so that both software engineering and those who built it would receive the respect they deserved, so I began using the term “software engineering” to differentiate it from hardware and other forms of engineering. When I first started using these words, they were considered funny. It was a running joke for a long time. They liked to make fun of my radical ideas. Software eventually earned the same respect as any other discipline.
found another retelling: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/13/margaret-...
> During the early days of Apollo, software was not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines. Though in fact we had a complex system of systems, we weren’t getting credit for what was a legitimate field. It was out of desperation I came up with the term, to say: “Hey, we’re engineering too.” It was an ongoing joke for a long time. Then one day in a meeting, one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone that he agreed with me. The process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. It was a memorable moment.
It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also https://findingada.com/.
But... Margaret Hamilton was one of those forbears. She got the ideas out there; PRIDE just commercialized them and made them palatable to business IT shops.
What a loss!
Tangent: Her LEGO minifig next to the Apollo code is one of my, and my daughter’s, favorites.
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/blt75c3f3f6b4cb0e7c/2...