Margaret Hamilton, Lead Programmer, Apollo Program's Guidance Computer

[Astronuc]

Margaret Hamilton the Pioneering Software Engineer Who Saved the Moon Landing​

https://interestingengineering.com/margaret-hamilton-software-engineer-who-saved-the-moon-landing

When warning lights started going off in the middle of the Eagle module's descent toward the lunar surface, NASA faced a tough decision: continue with the landing or abort.
. . .

"It quickly became clear that the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it," Hamilton said on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. "With only minutes to spare, the decision was made to go for the landing."

Even though Hamilton was just 32 years old at the time, NASA's mission control staff trusted her software, too. They gave Armstrong and Aldrin the go-ahead to land on the moon, and Hamilton's error-correcting code saw to it that they were successful.

Born on August 17, 1936, in the town of Paoli, Indiana, her family soon moved to Michigan where, after graduating high school, she attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for a time.

She soon transferred to Earlham College, back in her birth state of Indiana, though, graduating with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, with a minor in philosophy. Hamilton credits the head of the college's science department, Florence Long, for inspiring her to pursue a career in abstract math.

While at Earlham, Hamilton also met her first husband, James Cox Hamilton, who was a senior at the college, studying chemistry. They married on June 15, 1958, and after her husband graduated from Earlham and the couple moved to Boston. There, they had a daughter, Lauren, in 1959, and Hamilton was all set to enroll in a graduate mathematics program at Brandeis University when fate took a fortuitous turn.

Margaret Hamilton began working with Edward Lorenz, the father of Chaos Theory, in MIT's meteorology department. As part of her work there, Hamilton learned how to program using the PDP-1 and LGP-30 computers to create predictive models for weather forecasting.

An amazing career.

Read the rest on the link above.

 

[Andrew Mason]

The story of her MIT software team was nicely documented in "Make it to the Moon" which was broadcast in 2019 around the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing.

AM

 

[Vanadium 50]

"I'll get you my pretty...and your little dog too!" -
Oh, wait. That's the other Margaret Hamilton.

I actually met this Margaret Hamilton. She was around the Institute. Her hobby horse was reducing software errors. This was about the time when software suddenly became a lot more capable because one was no longer working around such severe hardware limitations. It took a few decades to understand how to handle this development. Some might argue we aren't there now.

 

[jedishrfu]

Late to the party here, but just found this video on her career:



https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/320/margaret-hamilton/

and also discovered that the AGC code is on Github somewhere as AGC assembler code:

https://qz.com/726338/the-code-that...-to-github-and-its-like-a-1960s-time-capsule/

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/

and a simulation of the AGC

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

 

[dlgoff]

Late to the party here, but just found this video on her career:

There was an episode on the History Channel about her that I watched.