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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.