Margaret Hamilton, Senior Software Engineer of the "Apollo"




Margaret Hamilton in the years of manned flight program to the Moon "Apollo». I>

Under this name can be found this image on the Internet. At first glance it's just a joke Photo - colleagues photographed Woman with a pile of office paper, and be in those days, social networking, photo dispersed to network with some funny comments. Just as now. And not a man who would be interested in such a Margaret Hamilton and what is happening in the photo. In fact, Margaret Hamilton was the leading software engineer in the draft program of manned flights to the Moon "Apollo", as in the above photo, it's worth before printing code for the on-board computer "Apollo", a hefty portion of which she wrote and she revizirovala. Apollo 11 could not land at all only because it has developed a software securely enough to bypass occurred during landing error conditions.
At the time of the first in the history of mankind landing on the moon she was 31.

There are at present the tradition of men to women entrust the work, which deals with laziness, bored and generally low-paid work because is not very complicated, but it requires painstaking obviously rooted in the mists of time. Therefore, with the advent of the first computers of the women were given new jobs, mostly related to the laborious data entry and computer programs.


The seemingly simple job for punching and punch card entry into the reader, and then work with the terminal does not require great intelligence. But we must remember that they were the first who faced a new sphere of human activity, and no computer science disciplines did not exist. Everything what happened the first time they have faced, so take advantage of other people's experiences, look at the user manual or call the support service was not possible. Widely known for Grace Hopper , at least, the development of the first compiler for a computer programming language. And it is obvious that all was not as easy as it may seem.

Margaret Hamilton received a bachelor's degree in mathematics at Earlham in 1958 and apparently did not know anything about programming, is not yet got a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she learned to write computer software, no other way to learn to program, in addition to self did not exist .

She put her thesis for the opportunity to work on the software for the Apollo program, and eventually became the head of Software Engineering in Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT for a manned flight program "Apollo" and "Skylab". She has published more than 130 papers.

In 1986, she founded and became CEO of Hamilton Technologies, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, company developer programming language Universal Systems Language . "The language of universal systems", warning, and does not correct the error conditions, which is based on systems theory and builds on the lessons of the project on the development of flight software ships "Apollo».

For his contribution to the success of the program "Apollo" and in the field of software development, it was awarded three awards:
1986, Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, Association for Women in Computing. 2003, NASA Exceptional Space Act Award for scientific and technical contributions. The award included a cash prize of $ 37,200, the largest personal amount of awards in the history of NASA. 2009, Outstanding Alumni Award, Earlham College What happened July 20, 1969 and the obligation to Humanity 31-year-old self-taught a programmer?
После undocking command and service module and the lunar radar docking switch was placed in the wrong position due to an error in the instructions for astronauts, radar sent the wrong signals board computer. Processing false signals occupy 15% of computer time on-board computer, provide landing on the moon. The merit of Hamilton is a competent software development, in which it has provided the priority tasks. On-board computer after receiving a certain number of messages from non-priority tasks, "concentrated" on a priority task - lunar landing and ignored non-priority tasks.
Margaret Hamilton is also credited with introducing the term "software engineering".

Interestingly, in one year, Margaret was born in the USSR Revmir Pryadchenko who graduated from the Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty of Leningrad State University, got a job at the Center for Deep Space Communications, where she not only directly engaged in official duties for receiving telemetry and registration "papers", but and went further to analyze the received information. Played an important role in the early history of space exploration. Eventually became head of the department for processing telemetry data. Unfortunately, a series of failures in the Soviet space program, and then stagnation touched not only the Soviet space program, but also the fate of the participants, which was not as favorable as Margaret. But that's another story, which is likely to disappear soon, together with the latest witness and participate in early space exploration.

"We only know how to love the dead."
"Boris Godunov" (1825)
Pushkin.

P.S.

Int_13h December 14, 2014 at 18: 59 #
This video should be here:


21 minutes is just the process of flashing the ROM :) blockquote>

Source: geektimes.ru/post/242925/

Tags

See also

New and interesting