Apollo Software Pioneer Margaret Hamilton Dies at 90 (mit.edu) 48
"Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. Her life's work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: "Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon." "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.
"The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."
"The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."
Erm (Score:5, Insightful)
It took 2 days for "news for nerds" to post this? And it takes you 3 seconds to post a story about tesla or openai? A rethink is in order..
Re:Erm (Score:4, Insightful)
She's not gonna wake up and walk away. Telsa and OpenAl could be gone tomorrow.
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She's not gonna wake up and walk away. Telsa and OpenAl could be gone tomorrow.
The fiscal aftermath of one of the magnificent seven, being suddenly gone tomorrow?
I’ll take the zombie option.
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oh the likely hood is high
Re: Erm (Score:2)
And that is how you show respect. Well done parents! Must be real proud?!
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She's not going to hear it, is she? You didn't exactly honor her achievements either. You just used her death for a cheap jab at Slashdot.
Re:Erm (Score:5, Funny)
Telsa and OpenAl could be gone tomorrow.
Stop, I can only get so erect.
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Quick! Think of dead kittens [imdb.com]!
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I've noticed, a very long time since it was “News for nerds.”
Re: Erm (Score:2)
It isn't anymore?
Re: Erm (Score:5, Funny)
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To be fair AI can publish stories grand standing itself at a faster speed.
I wonder what Margaret made of the incoming age of stupidity dependent on AI.
I am hoping she'd say, "screw that" and get her slide rule out. She wouldn't trust it either.
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It took 2 days for "news for nerds" to post this? And it takes you 3 seconds to post a story about tesla or openai? A rethink is in order..
I'm not nearly as proactive as I might be when it comes to submitting and vetting potential stories here. I suspect that many others are in the same boat. So I try not to be too hard on the editors over story quality, when AFAICT digging up and upvoting good ones is supposed to be OUR job.
Re: Erm (Score:3, Interesting)
You know I've been on this thing for almost 30 years and never figured out the "upvoting" and other fancy finctions people often brag about...
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You know I've been on this thing for almost 30 years and never figured out the "upvoting" and other fancy finctions people often brag about...
You must have missed that "firehose" link that's been at the top for 25 years or so. I wouldn't brag quite so hard about missing it, personally.
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A little bit of javascript is like being a little bit pregnant. There's no such thing as "just run the little bit javascript that upvotes".
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There's no such thing as "just run the little bit javascript that upvotes".
umatrix [mozilla.org] does that.
It is a lot of work to micromanage every website you use tho and it unfortunately has not been supported for five years but it does work.
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While powerful, filtering by domain is still pretty coarse. It's "run everything" from that domain, and anymore, several more where the web site has outsourced essential functions to. No fine-grained selection like "upvoting" or (a personal peeve) "la
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Errr no, it takes 2 days to post virtually anything on this site, including Tesla and OpenAI rubbish.
Good headline and balanced story (Score:2)
She did more good for NASA and computing than we know.
We made some progress apparently since the headline and the article are positive and not a victim narrative.
It would help greatly if news did that more and less of always looking for a who is a victim angle.
A fantastic engineer (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only did she develop software without the aid of modern debugging tools, on a new architecture that was limited in ways that most modern embedded developers can't even imagine, she pioneered a lot of the software safety techniques we still use.
Re:A fantastic engineer (Score:4, Interesting)
Well to be fair she didn't have to contend with strange undocumented behaviour from the Electron framework when programming a guidance computer. ;-)
I'm only going for partially funny here. The requirement for debugging tools is proportional to the complexity of what you're trying to do. In simple cases, especially the kinds which result in calculation output, you don't actually need debugging tools. You can work backwards from the output (or pipe an intermediate stage of your software to the output) and work backwards from there to identify the bug.
That's not to belittle here truly incredible achievements though. She should be an inspiration to all, and a wakeup call to every vibe coding moron who creates a weather app that uses 1GB of RAM to tell you it's fucking raining.
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It only needs about 700MB to tell you it's raining, it doesn't go over a gigabyte until you want to see WHERE it's raining.
The 300MB difference is more than enough to support literally hundreds of users on glass terminals, on Unix of yesteryear. And silicon jebus wept.
Massive Props Are In Order (Score:4, Informative)
Maximum respect!
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She's an OG giant of our industry upon whose shoulders we stand to see farther. Along with other OGs of her time - Hopper, Vaughn, Granville, Johnson, et al.
She did this without modern tools such as CRTs, debuggers, syntax highlighting, Zoom calls, Internet, or even a 4-function calculator. That if you wanted to meet with someone it was on the phone or in person. With debugger output being reems and reems of green-bar printout of raw addresses and values with no interpreter. Your flow-chart template was
No AI involved (Score:2, Interesting)
I am a broken record.
Thank you Margaret. Hooray for humans!
Wicked Witch of the West (Score:3, Funny)
My first thought was "I didn't know the Wicked Witch of the West was also a software pioneer"
Re: Wicked Witch of the West (Score:1)
I'm sure someone at one point sent a newt into orbit...on purpose even...
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Took Apollo technology to make that broom fly.
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Sure. But if they get faked, it will come back to be counterproductive. Honesty matters.
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Women need positive role models today more than ever. I'm glad that this lady had her time on this planet and made the most of it.
You aren't kidding! Young women need role models that aren't pop culture divas.
The only caveat is that the promoters sometimes have a problem of adding digs at men, as in telling us how men suppressed women.
So rather than say "Annie Jump Cannon" was an incredible Astronomer, who took on the daunting work of cataloging stars, even creating the first they say how she was ignored, and uncelebrated because of the patriarchy. Fact is she had many accolades and was extremely worthy of them. https://en.wiki [wikipedia.org]
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By looking at your /. ID - you've been around long enough to know when Software Engineering was last attempted in main stream software development work (Mid-late '90's). And when it was kicked to the curb for being "too slow" and the mantra of "move fast and break things" became in vogue (DotCom era).
It's still used - for systems for that absolutely, positively, have to work right the first time. Those tend to be in highly regulated or safety critical environments - pharma manufacturing, banking/finance,
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"To win the 20th century space race" (Score:3)
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The Soviets appeared to concede at that point. They cancelled their manned lunar program.
In the future (Score:2)
Wicked Witch of the West (Score:2)
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That's engineering (Score:5, Informative)
The story about her daughter crashing the simulator says a lot about how she worked. Hamilton wanted a safeguard against starting a prelaunch program during flight; she was told the astronauts were too well trained to make that mistake. Then Lovell did it on Apollo 8, and her team had to help recover. Anyone who's been told "the user won't do that" should recognize that argument. She took the possibility of failure seriously, and the priority handling in her team's Apollo 11 software meant an overloaded computer could keep doing the work needed for the landing. Imagine watching that happen during the actual descent, knowing the recovery mechanisms your team built were being put to the test. I'm glad she lived long enough to receive so much recognition for that work. Rest in peace.