Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer, Apollo Project

Margaret Hamilton during the Apollo moon program.

Under this title you can find this photo on the Internet. At first glance, this is just a joke - colleagues photographed a girl with a pile of office papers, and if social networks were in those times, the photo would have gone online with some funny commentary. Just like now. And few people would be interested in who such Margaret Hamilton is and what happens in the photo. In fact, Margaret Hamilton was the lead software engineer in the Apollo Moon project, and in the photo above, she stands in front of a printout of the Apollo on-board computer, a good part of which she herself wrote and which she revised. Apollo 11 was able to land at all only because it developed software reliably enough to bypass the failed situations that occurred during landing.
At the time of the first landing on the moon in the history of mankind, she turned 31.

The tradition of men nowadays to entrust women with work that is too lazy to do is boring and, in general, work is poorly paid because not very complicated, but it requires laboriousness, apparently rooted in the depths of centuries. Therefore, with the advent of the first computers, women received a part of new workplaces, mainly related to the painstaking entry of data and programs into computers.

A seemingly simple job of punching and inserting punched cards into a reader, and later working with a terminal does not require much intelligence. But we must remember that they were the first to encounter a new field of human activity and no computer science disciplines existed yet. Everything they encountered happened for the first time, so there was no opportunity to use someone else's experience, look into the instructions or call support. Grace Hopper is widely known, at a minimum, for developing the first compiler for a computer programming language. And it is obvious that not everything was as simple as it might seem.

Margaret Hamilton received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Earlham College in 1958 and apparently did not know anything about programming until she got a job at MIT, where she learned how to write software for computers; there was no other way to program programming other than self-education. .
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She put off her thesis for the opportunity to work on software for the Apollo program and eventually became the head of Software Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo and Skylab manned flight program. She has published over 130 papers.

In 1986, she founded and became CEO of Hamilton Technologies, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a company developing the programming language Universal Systems Language . "The language of universal systems", warning, rather than correcting crash situations, which is based on the theory of systems and is based on the lessons of the project on the development of on-board software for the Apollo ships.

For her contribution to the success of the Apollo program and in the field of software development, she was awarded three awards:

1. 1986, Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, Association for Women in Computing.
2. 2003, NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for scientific and technical contributions. The award included a cash award of $ 37,200, the largest personal award amount in NASA history.
3. 2009, Outstanding Alumni Award, Earlham College

What happened on July 20, 1969, and what does humanity owe to a 31-year-old self-taught programmer?
After disconnecting the command-and-service and lunar modules, the docking radar switch was put in the wrong position due to an error in the instructions for the astronauts, the radar sent erroneous signals to the onboard computer. Processing of false signals took 15% of the computer time of the on-board computer, which ensured landing on the moon. The merit of Hamilton lies in the competent development of software, in which it has foreseen the priority of tasks. The on-board computer, after receiving a certain number of messages from a non-priority task, “concentrated” on the priority task - landing and ignoring non-priority tasks.
Margaret Hamilton is also credited with introducing the term “software engineering”.

Interestingly, in one year, Margaret was born in the USSR Revvmir Pryadchenko, who graduated from the Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty of Leningrad State University, got a job at the Center for Long-Distance Space Communications, where she was engaged not only in official duties in receiving telemetry and writing paperwork, but and went further along the path of analyzing the received information. She played an important role in the history of early cosmonautics. She eventually became the head of the telemetry information processing department. Unfortunately, a series of failures in the Soviet cosmonautics and then stagnation touched not only the Soviet cosmonautics, but also the fate of the participants themselves, which was not as supportive as Margaret. But this is another story, which is likely to disappear soon, along with the latest witnesses and participants in the early cosmonautics.

"Only the dead can love us."
"Boris Godunov" (1825)
A. S. Pushkin.

PS

Int_13h December 14, 2014 at 18: 59 #
This video should be here:


21 minutes just the process of firmware ROM :)