Thanks to Unindicted Co-conspirator #1 for today’s topic.
Margaret Hamilton – pioneer in Computer Science, designer of the on-board Apollo flight software, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. She also coined the term “software engineering.”
Presidential Medal of Freedom
The very first contract NASA issued for the Apollo program (in August 1961) was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop the guidance and navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft. Hamilton, a computer programmer, would wind up leading the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now Draper Labs). Computer science, as we now know it, was just coming into existence at the time. Hamilton led the team that developed the building blocks of software engineering – a term that she coined herself. Her systems approach to the Apollo software development and insistence on rigorous testing was critical to the success of Apollo. As she noted, “There was no second chance. We all knew that.” – NASA Website
Margaret H. Hamilton: Margaret H. Hamilton led the team that created the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo command modules and lunar modules. A mathematician and computer scientist who started her own software company, Hamilton contributed to concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling and priority displays, and human-in-the-loop decision capability, which set the foundation for modern, ultra-reliable software design and engineering.
– White House Archives
Lego’s Women of NASA
“In 2017, a “Women of NASA” LEGO set went on sale featuring minifigures of Hamilton, Mae Jemison, Sally Ride, and Nancy Grace Roman.” – Wikipedia
Co-conspirator #1’s Personal Connection
While still in high school, I fell in with a bunch of misfits, who, among other things, took over a garage and filled it with ham radio equipment and electronics parts stripped from the CF-100 jets that were being scrapped at the airport in Lethbridge. One of the members was getting involved with computing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where they had a non-working LGP-30. Paul convinced the UofA to let us borrow it to see if we could make it work.
We worked on this machine for many, many hours and could not get it to even go through the basic bootstrap process.
I figured the failure was in the “logic board”, an array of diodes that routed signals to various parts of the computer, and I set out to find which of the 1400 diodes had failed. It took a few hours with the ohmmeter, but I found the little bugger and when we replaced it, the LGP-30 came to life!
We got to the point where we could load the FORTRAN compiler (from punch tape) without errors and then wrote a few small programs. Unfortunately, the UofA decided they wanted it back for their museum where it has now faded into antiquity.
Birthplace
Margaret Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana on August 17th, 1936.
Distance from Edmonton, Alberta: 3,084 km
Distance from Austin, Texas: 1,046 miles
Distance from Santa Barbara, California: 2,144 miles
WLBOTT Status: Approved
Will there be a Buffet? High Probability
