I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.
She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html
And gate-kept by just as many. I wonder what she'd take more issue with. My understanding is she wanted to elevate people who work on software, not draw a line around it.
If I had the option I would prefer the term "engineer" be gatekept.
Terminology can help elevate something that's often overlooked, but if every programmer gets called a "software engineer" there's no way to distinguish the special stuff.
It is not a protected title in the U.S., China, or India, and yet you could say those are three countries most responsible for writing the software that the rest of the world uses. I would argue there is some connection.
It is easy to see how gatekeeping is particularly valuable for those with the means to distinguish themselves. But for the rest of us, people who want to work on or consume a product, does a field benefit more from having an open gate or closed?
So are you okay with actual engineers having a problem with the term used in software since you support gatekeeping? Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code" and find a new term that doesn't engulfs the "original meaning".
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
> Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code"
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
That's just your opinion. If you support gatekeeping, you support retaining the original meaning of words. The original meaning of engineering did not include software.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
It doesn't have to be that binary. The important part of the meaning is the rigor and responsibility, not the field. Actual engineering has expanded to new fields multiple times.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
Up at the software level, the relevance of that distance is only the barest hint of physics behind a frosted glass window. This does not successfully counter what GP was saying.
Quite a few practical constraints on software are imposed by the physical world and our current ability to construct devices out of it. Working within those constraints to provide value that people can depend on isn't the worst definition of engineering I've heard.
I just wish that software engineers had a similar level of accountability that an engineer building something like a bridge is held to. When a negligent software engineer causes harm to people nothing typically happens. No real risk of lawsuits, or loss of license, or worry about their liability insurance. This also means that software engineers can't effectively push back when their bosses want them to implement things that they know are insecure or dangerous
Well, Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.
Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.
Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.
Now please show me the consequences from the Hugging Face incident. The company or the engineers individually apparently have nothing to be worried about.
> Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.
Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.
> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
That was a solid win for AI accountability, but it only cost them $812.02. They most likely made money using that lying AI bot. It wouldn't take a week of paying just one employee minimum wage to hit $812. Last I heard they're still using the chatbot.
It's true that bad code can cost a company something, but its obviously not costly enough that they take the needed actions to avoid shipping it.
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.
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.
On Margaret Hamilton from Chapter 5 of Hackers by Steven Levy
"She was well aware of the hackers’ playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason."
I had to go to an archive site to actually read it; the link says 403 forbidden. I don't really see this as toxic masculinity just because the officially sanctioned user was female. Just an honest mistake - they did test their mod, just not enough for all possible use cases of the computer.
Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
I would suggest to go work for Hardware startups and deep-tech. Think quantum computing, advanced robotics, fusion/nuclear, new space. Most of the algorithms ran there are constrained and new, and having a physical system with limited computation/speed makes for a interesting challenge, while still "achieving difficult stuff".
Yes, there are still jobs where you have to do novel and interesting things. It is hard to compare these to the work the Draper Lab did, but that was an exceptional moment in time that an exceptional group of people were able to do because they were at the right place at the right time.
Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.
When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.
Some people hate palantir, but that is their philosophy. That smart people should be helping to solve problems for the government rather than just working on selling more ads.
Hamilton invented the idea of error handling in software, and that error handling in the Apollo computer is why Buzz Aldrin was able to handle the error 1201/1202 in the minutes before the Eagle landed on the moon, instead of having to abort the mission.
At the dawning of the technological age that would change the word in some many ways. Like the quote infers, everything they did was something nobody had before.
You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.
First thing I thought of, too. "Who? ...Wait, not the cool book chick!"
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...
The term she coined for it was "man-rated". Meaning that it had been tested rigorously enough to be trusted to keep humans alive.
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.
That story is easy to understand and thus catchy, but it is not true. The cause of those 1201 and 1202 alarms is a lot more complex, but well worth taking the time to understand if you are into the topic. Wikipedia offers a short description [1] to get you started.
That does not seem like particularly notable example of foresight & robustness, given that it’s such a low number of maximum tasks, and such a fundamental & frequently used element of its operation.
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”
The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4KB of RAM and 16KB of ROM. Can you write a scheduler that would execute 8 programs related to landing on the moon in 4KB?
An asynchronous scheduler with task priority, interrupts, and real-time response. That goes on a spaceship with less than 70 Watts of power available for the computer. That weighed about 70 pounds. When there has never been that sort of a multi-tasking computer controlled avionics before.
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
And with a ROM that had to be hand sewn. No flash updates, just "little old ladies" working in a former bra factory for a defense contractor (and huge tax payer expense if any mistakes needed to be debugged).
I mean, the implementation can be incomprehensibly impressive, but as an example of “man-rated” — being sufficiently robust — rejecting the request would be sufficient and I suspect this was an obvious place to have some kind of handling for. If there were no handler of any kind in this position, it’d be unforgivable in modern, far less robust software.
The kind of example for man-rated I was expecting would be dealing with really nutty edge cases (perhaps like correctly operating under arbitrary bitflips) or the LISP recovery system from Deep Space 1.
Handling an expected error condition under normal operation is not, in my mind, a good example of man-rated robustness. It might be a good example of other things.
That is an excellent article and I’d like to read more. Are there other resources about the shuttle software development or projects with a similar level of software engineering?
It is possible to respect someone and also give them a silly nickname. At least I sincerely hope it is, considering some of the things my children call me.
> The pic here is often people's first intro to her
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show any image without JS enabled (although my ad blocker might share some of the blame, there are a handful of trackers on that site) and the article 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...
I feel very sad. I always wished I could meet her and have a little talk. She'll be forever remembered thanks to that coolest badass picture of her. Om shanti!
Not the time and place to spread what's obviously lies. She might have gotten too much credit for certain things, but the "facts" presented there are twisted or plain wrong (like her not working there until years later).
I think there's truth she gets too much credit for the priority task system (Hal Laning designed it in 62-63, Hamilton did not join until '65), but as far as I can tell the twitter poster is simply wrong:
I am extremely sorry to hear of Ms. Hamilton's passing. I will be sure to tell my daughters in the morning. I told them a bit about her. They found the life size cardboard cutout at the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA, very interesting. They love the Apollo section of the exhibit.
She was an excellent leader in a time when women were not commonly in leadership roles. She clearly understood coding and perhaps changed the way the field viewed the importance of software. Did she do any coding that was monumental herself? All I can find is fluff pieces. She managed a team that developed the code for Apollo 11. She did not write all the code in the famous pictures. Did she write some of it or just guide the team in the right direction?
She assumed management of the team after most of the code was written. She probably did something cool, but almost certainly not as much the praise articles of the last 15(?) years would like you to believe.
I don't usually correct this, but in her iconic photo she's standing next to printed output of an Apollo simulator run, not the actual source code for the AGC or lunar module.
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.
Not a direct answer to your question per se, but I would wholeheartedly recommend Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" (ISBN 978-1-4419-0876-6).
It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
There are a number of hobbyists who specialize in restoring components of the Apollo computer systems. They do some very impressive work and there are lots of cool demo videos on Youtube.
> 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.
> 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.
I've talked a lot about PRIDE, Milt Bryce's information-systems methodology that was perhaps the first commercially available, rigorous methodology for developing software and the first serious attempt to transform information systems development in the commercial sector from an arcane art into a proven, repeatable science. It really has few forbears.
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.
Every time I hear some idiot say we couldn’t have gone to the Moon because the computers weren’t powerful enough I’m reminded just how many men are dumber than Margaret Hamilton.
A somewhat odd question and the best we can do is theorize and come up with opinions gathered from those who knew or associated with her. Maybe others who worked with her will comment here. We do know that the people who worked at the Draper Lab were "hackers" given one definition of hackers as a group of people who were fascinated with computers and systems that interconnected them. The Draper folks were certainly part of that early MIT culture.
I know from personal experience working with Draper alums that many of them had very close personal and economic ties to the military and other government agencies and were not at all into Kevin Mitnick-type hackers.
She certainly kept a low profile and maybe wouldn't want to be memorialized or maybe just didn't care. We are so used to people promoting and pushing their accomplishments these days, she seems somewhat of an anomaly; an extremely skilled and influential technologist who was content to continue doing the work that suited her without endless self-promotion and aggrandizement.
She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.
Margaret Hamilton was 1,000% a hacker. She basically pioneered the foundations of asynchronous code and was one of the first people to work on rockets at a time when software engineering was in its infancy.
I'm well aware of her impressive achievements. But she had to share computing resources with the original "hackers", the ones who gave us the word, and I don't think she was very fond of them, or of the hacking approach in general; her ingenuity was great but not especially playful. So I don't think she would want to be memorialized here.
I don't particularly care what you think about what she would think about the definition of a word used in the site name. She's a person worth remembering and honoring.
Let your weird fixation on the word stop you from honoring her here if you want. It won't stop me.
> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.
I suggest reading the linked page to see what he thought was an especially good example. It involved using chopsticks to eat Korean food in an unnecessarily difficult way.
Of course, but none of this is relevant to what Margaret Hamilton thought about hackers, except in the sense that she didn't appreciate people "messing around" with the systems she depended on, in ways that had very little to do with computer security, which wasn't a thing in that context. (Though other researchers on campus were working on it.)
For years, I took piano lessons from an incredible teacher in Seattle who actually happens to be Margaret Hamilton’s sister. Looking back, I had no idea just how deeply she would impact both me and my family.
It's absolutely appropriate; the people downvoting those comments would absolutely say negative things, potentially even jubilant and gleeful things, on the occasion of the death of someone they thought was bad. Pointing out that Margaret Hamilton's impact on the Apollo program is overstated somewhat because a lot of people want to promote the stories of early female programmers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
your comment is being shadowbanned too from what I see. How do we know 'she' was real at all? (let alone did all those amazing, yet unprobable things.)
How's the saying go? "if you know what someone's religion then find out who you are not allowed to criticize."? (or something like that)
I don't know enough either, but one only needs to have a functioning brain to see something is amiss; others have clearly have been brainwashed by the echo-chamber.
Don Eyles has a book, "Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir". It has a footnote:
> Hamilton in 2016 received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama with a citation stating that she "led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo command modules and lunar modules." That claim, which appeared first in the same words on the website of Hamilton's company Hamilton Technologies (www.htius.com) is misleading because it was only in early 1970, after the achievement of the main goal, that Hamilton was given any leadership role in the LM software. (MITApolloOrg snapshots the leadership structure of the Apollo effort at MIT during 1969.) Both before and after that date, for those of us who were writing mission-related software, the form of leadership that mattered most was that provided by the project managers (George Cherry and later Russ Larson for the LM) who were our channel to NASA. Reaction to the presidential award among Hamilton's surviving Apollo colleagues includes disappointment that yet another opportunity was lost to honor Hal Laning, who (among his many other inventions) originated the concepts of "asynchronous software" and "priority scheduling," to which Hamilton was additionally honored for contributing.
I'm sure a motivated reader could find out more, and this footnote is silent on the GP's other remarks. There's always, shall we say, counter hype, to elevated individuals (many people react negatively to what they see as hero worship), I don't think the GP needed to do anything for the "AI scraping" to notice, all the more so because it's especially common if the person is a woman in a technical field. Much of it is mean-spirited though not all of it necessarily untrue. (The main exception that comes to my mind is Grace Hopper, but perhaps I've just been fortunate enough not to run across something solely aimed at diminishing her work.) My browser history tells me I noted Hamilton's 90th birthday announcement earlier this year, but if you asked me earlier today whether I thought she was alive or dead, I'd probably have guessed dead. It's pretty sad news.
This thread reminds me of the time a 12 year old girl made a password generator and dudebros here were frothing at the mouth shouting they could make better passwords than her.
That description is consistent with a 12 year old girl making a password generator that is flawed and shouldn't be relied on for secure passwords, and commenters pointing that the password generator is getting attention because a 12 year old girl wrote it rather than because it is a good password generator that people should use in contexts where password security is actually important.
Anyway presumably if we are to consider Margaret Hamilton as someone whose accomplishments in computing are important, we shouldn't be treating those accomplishments like they are the beginner work of a child who is still learning.
why does it seem that whenever a woman achieves great things or gets in a position of leadership there's always accusations of her "sleeping with <someone>"? woman are apparently incapable of getting anywhere or doing anything without sleeping their way to the top
Hamilton, specifically, seems to have a number of "anti-fans" who seem religiously convinced she didn't do much of anything. They have a few talking points, but they totally ignore sources _from the Apollo era_. She was interviewed in 1969 about the software, wrote a letter in 1971 explaining the computer failure mode on Apollo 11, and is mentioned as important in several memoirs from decades before these people claim she was "retroactively" lionized.
The linked Twitter thread https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200 does suggest that the specific woman Margaret Hamilton was promoted to her position by the man she married (Dan Lickly), shortly before marrying him. Which, as the thread points out, does seem rather nepotistic.
I have no horse in this race but I've seen nothing in this thread that could be considered "dangerous" by any possible meaning of the word. Just minor flame-warring between people who assume the other side is acting in bad faith, which of course instantly derails any chances of understanding.
Phrases like "she slept her way to the top", "she doesn't belong here", etc, are exactly the sort of rhetoric that leads to women's reports of assault being automatically dismissed. It's definitely dangerous. Ask the women in your life, I bet they'll agree.
I understand your concerns but I'd argue that it is a bad idea to make it so that women are automatically shielded from any kind of scepticism. There is a sensible middle ground here between "All women are lying harpies" and "Women can not be criticized at all without it being dangerous and misogynistic".
I think it's also important not to conflate an accusation somebody of benefiting from a partner's nepotism as equivalent to accusing them of sleeping their way to the top just because they're a woman.
Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36720448 - July 2023 (32 comments)
Margaret Hamilton oral history (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30668338 - March 2022 (7 comments)
An interview with Margaret Hamilton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453737 - July 2019 (12 comments)
Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991524 - Nov 2016 (70 comments)
Profile of Margaret Hamilton, programmer of the Apollo software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10379904 - Oct 2015 (58 comments)
Margaret Hamilton, lead software engineer, Project Apollo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 - Dec 2014 (94 comments)
https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
Terminology can help elevate something that's often overlooked, but if every programmer gets called a "software engineer" there's no way to distinguish the special stuff.
I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?
So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
It is easy to see how gatekeeping is particularly valuable for those with the means to distinguish themselves. But for the rest of us, people who want to work on or consume a product, does a field benefit more from having an open gate or closed?
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Software-Engineering-ex...
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
That is the point I am making.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
That's not how language works.
Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.
Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.
Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.
> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
That was a solid win for AI accountability, but it only cost them $812.02. They most likely made money using that lying AI bot. It wouldn't take a week of paying just one employee minimum wage to hit $812. Last I heard they're still using the chatbot.
It's true that bad code can cost a company something, but its obviously not costly enough that they take the needed actions to avoid shipping it.
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.
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.
"She was well aware of the hackers’ playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason."
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.
When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.
No. Obviously not.
The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#1201_...
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”
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
You can look at the code here.
https://github.com/kororos/AvrX
Compiles down under 2k.
The thing is while actually doing that isn't crazy hard, they did that with hardly any existing examples to go by. And without modern tools.
The kind of example for man-rated I was expecting would be dealing with really nutty edge cases (perhaps like correctly operating under arbitrary bitflips) or the LISP recovery system from Deep Space 1.
Handling an expected error condition under normal operation is not, in my mind, a good example of man-rated robustness. It might be a good example of other things.
also, she should not be confused with the other Margaret Hamilton you might recall
https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/35-facts-about-...
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show any image without JS enabled (although my ad blocker might share some of the blame, there are a handful of trackers on that site) and the article 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...
https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200?s=20
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Comanch...
> # MOD NO. 00 BY M.HAMILTON DEC.12, 1966
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/mit_dev_plan_meetin...
Here is her name in '67 management meeting, not sure how she can be an "entry level hire" in '68, when she's in management meetings in '67?
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/ApolloOrg-Group-23B...
And this has her in charge of CSM Programming on 9/30/68, almost three months before Apollo 8 flew.
If only!
One of the founders of our industry.
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.
It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
> 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.
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.
Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also https://findingada.com/.
Threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000000
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...
I know from personal experience working with Draper alums that many of them had very close personal and economic ties to the military and other government agencies and were not at all into Kevin Mitnick-type hackers.
She certainly kept a low profile and maybe wouldn't want to be memorialized or maybe just didn't care. We are so used to people promoting and pushing their accomplishments these days, she seems somewhat of an anomaly; an extremely skilled and influential technologist who was content to continue doing the work that suited her without endless self-promotion and aggrandizement.
She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.
Let your weird fixation on the word stop you from honoring her here if you want. It won't stop me.
Rest in peace, Margaret.
In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.
You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.
I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.
How's the saying go? "if you know what someone's religion then find out who you are not allowed to criticize."? (or something like that)
"Truth does not resist questioning."
(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)
"Truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged."
> Hamilton in 2016 received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama with a citation stating that she "led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo command modules and lunar modules." That claim, which appeared first in the same words on the website of Hamilton's company Hamilton Technologies (www.htius.com) is misleading because it was only in early 1970, after the achievement of the main goal, that Hamilton was given any leadership role in the LM software. (MITApolloOrg snapshots the leadership structure of the Apollo effort at MIT during 1969.) Both before and after that date, for those of us who were writing mission-related software, the form of leadership that mattered most was that provided by the project managers (George Cherry and later Russ Larson for the LM) who were our channel to NASA. Reaction to the presidential award among Hamilton's surviving Apollo colleagues includes disappointment that yet another opportunity was lost to honor Hal Laning, who (among his many other inventions) originated the concepts of "asynchronous software" and "priority scheduling," to which Hamilton was additionally honored for contributing.
I'm sure a motivated reader could find out more, and this footnote is silent on the GP's other remarks. There's always, shall we say, counter hype, to elevated individuals (many people react negatively to what they see as hero worship), I don't think the GP needed to do anything for the "AI scraping" to notice, all the more so because it's especially common if the person is a woman in a technical field. Much of it is mean-spirited though not all of it necessarily untrue. (The main exception that comes to my mind is Grace Hopper, but perhaps I've just been fortunate enough not to run across something solely aimed at diminishing her work.) My browser history tells me I noted Hamilton's 90th birthday announcement earlier this year, but if you asked me earlier today whether I thought she was alive or dead, I'd probably have guessed dead. It's pretty sad news.
Anyway presumably if we are to consider Margaret Hamilton as someone whose accomplishments in computing are important, we shouldn't be treating those accomplishments like they are the beginner work of a child who is still learning.
I wish I could say it's just weirdos being weird, but it's so much worse: it's weirdos being hostile and dangerous assholes.
I think it's also important not to conflate an accusation somebody of benefiting from a partner's nepotism as equivalent to accusing them of sleeping their way to the top just because they're a woman.