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The Woman Who Got Man to the Moon

calamity

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I did not know this.

Apollo 11 Software Engineer Margaret Hamilton Recalls Moon Landing

margaret_hamilton.jpg


“I remember thinking, Oh my God, it worked,” the pioneering software engineer tells TIME. “I was so happy. But I was more happy about it working than about the fact that we landed.”

The “it” that worked was Apollo 11’s on-board flight software, which Hamilton, as part of the MIT team working with NASA, led the effort to build.

...work that Hamilton had done helped enable the computer to figure out which of the multiple processes it had to do was most important. “It got rid of the lesser priority jobs and kept the higher priority jobs, which included the landing functions,” she explains.
 
just proof of what people can achieve on their own initiative if they work hard at it.
 
Yeah, the footnotes of (a rather sexist) history are littered with women accomplishing rather amazing things (e.g. The Manhattan Project certainly had many women calculators, coders, and computers). Coding and calculating was, ironically, seen as a "woman's job." This example is particularly well-known on social media now.


Not to detract from her accomplishments but the Apollo guidance computer was a TEAM effort that included Charles Stark Draper, Eldon C. Hall, J.H. Laning Jr, Ramon Alonzo, Albert Hopkins, Hugh Blair-Smith and Richard Battin.

The design principles used to program the AGC became the foundation for software engineering for decades to come. J. Halcombe Laning, a true computer pioneer designed a real time operating system with cooperative multi-tasking and scheduling and interrupt capabilities that are still employed to this day.

The Apollo guidance computer was also the first Computer to use Integrated Circuits provided by Fairchild Semiconductor.
 
Not to detract from her accomplishments but the Apollo guidance computer was a TEAM effort that included Charles Stark Draper, Eldon C. Hall, J.H. Laning Jr, Ramon Alonzo, Albert Hopkins, Hugh Blair-Smith and Richard Battin.

The design principles used to program the AGC became the foundation for software engineering for decades to come. J. Halcombe Laning, a true computer pioneer designed a real time operating system with cooperative multi-tasking and scheduling and interrupt capabilities that are still employed to this day.

The Apollo guidance computer was also the first Computer to use Integrated Circuits provided by Fairchild Semiconductor.

She provided a specific solution to a very significant problem. It was a big deal. Read the article in the OP.
 
She provided a specific solution to a very significant problem. It was a big deal. Read the article in the OP.

They ALL provided specific solutions for significant problems.

They were essentially working from scratch, building and programming a prototype and some of Lanings applied programming innovations are still in use today.
 
Yeah, the footnotes of (a rather sexist) history are littered with women accomplishing rather amazing things (e.g. The Manhattan Project certainly had many women calculators, coders, and computers). Coding and calculating was, ironically, seen as a "woman's job." This example is particularly well-known on social media now.

Same with the Enigma Code Breakers of WWII at Bletchley Park. The majority were actually women... even at the top level many were women.
 
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