I think projects like Apollo are important in a way that they let extraordinary people to use their capabilities.
I feel from personal experiences as well as from many close people that often the corporate world really struggles on dealing with talent. And I don't mean autistic savants doing obscure things but relatively normal but very competent people doing actual well based comprehensive business helping work - but you have to do something in a very dumbed down way because the organization is built in a way to only accept small changes to the state of the art.
It's not just "can these organizations produce brilliant output?" but "can they produce quality output?" I think you can take a lot of pride in doing ordinary things properly and giving people good experiences.
I stayed at a major chain hotel this weekend and it was a fine stay, the staff was great, but... there were just numerous little tech problems. Like the USB chargers had bad connections so I plugged in my phone overnight and it didn't charge and the next morning I found I had to twist the connector to get it to work. And then when I tried to connect to the WiFi with a Steam Deck [1] it wanted my personal info to join their rewards program, but the complicated Javascript-based dropdown menu to pick a state barely worked and after a minute of screwing with it I was able to pick the wrong state but not pick my real state so I looked up a zip code in that state and entered it.
When I got home I got an email from "no-reply@thathotelchainfoundedbyparishiltonsgreatgrandfather.com" gushing about how they want me to have the perfect experience and how badly they want to hear from me. Like yeah, they want me to call their 800 number and give me a piece of my mind.
It bugs me because I spend my day fixing problems with Javascript apps and I know all about those overcomplicated dropdowns. I get the feeling that if a staff member screwed up they'd be held accountable but people act like technology problems are like the weather and there is nothing we can do about it.
[1] granted an unusual device BUT... I don't travel with a laptop anymore, don't need to connect my phone with WiFi in 5G country and may or may not connect my iPhone. They could have just used the <select> that comes with HTML and it would have "just worked" and today you have so many options to style those with CSS
Yeah, something like the Apollo project has an exciting and profound enough destination/vision that it acts like a forcing function that herds all the cats.
The thing I've taken away most from my multidecade career is that the hardest part is getting any group of people all marching in the same direction, of their own volition. Everyone's motivations always differ. And leadership that just tries to force one direction almost always fails to consider enough viewpoints. And the alternatives, a deliberate rhizomatic chaos, or cutthroat competition,
can be entirely demoralizing.
I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.
Thanks for sharing this story from this point of view so genuinely. I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would enjoy any comments under this sad news.
She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html
And gate-kept by just as many. I wonder what she'd take more issue with. My understanding is she wanted to elevate people who work on software, not draw a line around it.
... an audacious choice of words according to the Austrian association of (real) engineers that get all red-faced and jittery even thinking about it! These peasants, bah, they can't even...
Quite a few practical constraints on software are imposed by the physical world and our current ability to construct devices out of it. Working within those constraints to provide value that people can depend on isn't the worst definition of engineering I've heard.
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.
A fascinating potential link between the two famous popular books on early computing and mathematics, 'Hackers', and 'Chaos' by James Gleick (two books that shaped my teenage years fwiw).
Is the link to Edward Lorenz just a guess based on the name and subject matter of the project given in the Hackers extract? Or do you have information from some other source that Margaret Hamilton wrote code for Lorenz?
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.
On Margaret Hamilton from Chapter 5 of Hackers by Steven Levy
"She was well aware of the hackers’ playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason."
I had to go to an archive site to actually read it; the link says 403 forbidden. I don't really see this as toxic masculinity just because the officially sanctioned user was female. Just an honest mistake - they did test their mod, just not enough for all possible use cases of the computer.
Hamilton invented the idea of error handling in software, and that error handling in the Apollo computer is why Buzz Aldrin was able to handle the error 1201/1202 in the minutes before the Eagle landed on the moon, instead of having to abort the mission.
Certainly that could be described as "error handling", but I would describe what saved the landing as priority scheduling combined with restart protection.
Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
I would suggest to go work for Hardware startups and deep-tech. Think quantum computing, advanced robotics, fusion/nuclear, new space. Most of the algorithms ran there are constrained and new, and having a physical system with limited computation/speed makes for a interesting challenge, while still "achieving difficult stuff".
Yes, there are still jobs where you have to do novel and interesting things. It is hard to compare these to the work the Draper Lab did, but that was an exceptional moment in time that an exceptional group of people were able to do because they were at the right place at the right time.
Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.
When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.
Some people hate palantir, but that is their philosophy. That smart people should be helping to solve problems for the government rather than just working on selling more ads.
At the dawning of the technological age that would change the word in some many ways. Like the quote infers, everything they did was something nobody had before.
You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.
First thing I thought of, too. "Who? ...Wait, not the cool book chick!"
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...
The term she coined for it was "man-rated". Meaning that it had been tested rigorously enough to be trusted to keep humans alive.
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
That is an excellent article and I’d like to read more. Are there other resources about the shuttle software development or projects with a similar level of software engineering?
> The pic here is often people's first intro to her
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show any image without JS enabled (although my ad blocker might share some of the blame, there are a handful of trackers on that site) and the article doesn't link directly to it either. I'm guessing you mean the pic here: https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...
Yeah, when I first saw the headline, I was momentarily confused because I thought she was already dead and didn’t know that she had a career beyond acting but then anything is possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
I feel very sad. I always wished I could meet her and have a little talk. She'll be forever remembered thanks to that coolest badass picture of her. Om shanti!
I am extremely sorry to hear of Ms. Hamilton's passing. I will be sure to tell my daughters in the morning. I told them a bit about her. They found the life size cardboard cutout at the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA, very interesting. They love the Apollo section of the exhibit.
I don't usually correct this, but in her iconic photo she's standing next to printed output of an Apollo simulator run, not the actual source code for the AGC or lunar module.
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.
She was an excellent leader in a time when women were not commonly in leadership roles. She clearly understood coding and perhaps changed the way the field viewed the importance of software. Did she do any coding that was monumental herself? All I can find is fluff pieces. She managed a team that developed the code for Apollo 11. She did not write all the code in the famous pictures. Did she write some of it or just guide the team in the right direction?
She assumed management of the team after most of the code was written. She probably did something cool, but almost certainly not as much the praise articles of the last 15(?) years would like you to believe.
Margaret, along with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, was such a huge inspiration to me as a young engineer. I'm honored to be in a field pioneered by women such as them, even if it's turned into a male-dominated field today. Rest in peace to a real legend.
Fun Fact: "Computer" was a profession before it was a thing. Computers did math on complex systems, often with the help of sin/cos/tan tables and the like. And they were usually women.
Not a direct answer to your question per se, but I would wholeheartedly recommend Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" (ISBN 978-1-4419-0876-6).
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.
> 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.
There are a number of hobbyists who specialize in restoring components of the Apollo computer systems. They do some very impressive work and there are lots of cool demo videos on Youtube.
I've talked a lot about PRIDE, Milt Bryce's information-systems methodology that was perhaps the first commercially available, rigorous methodology for developing software and the first serious attempt to transform information systems development in the commercial sector from an arcane art into a proven, repeatable science. It really has few forbears.
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.
A link has been removed from other comments which argues with primary sources that she did not participate in the moon landing project to the extent suggested here. Her rise in popularity coincided with a Wikipedia effort to identify "overlooked heroes" in math and science.
Every time I hear some idiot say we couldn’t have gone to the Moon because the computers weren’t powerful enough I’m reminded just how many men are dumber than Margaret Hamilton.
A somewhat odd question and the best we can do is theorize and come up with opinions gathered from those who knew or associated with her. Maybe others who worked with her will comment here. We do know that the people who worked at the Draper Lab were "hackers" given one definition of hackers as a group of people who were fascinated with computers and systems that interconnected them. The Draper folks were certainly part of that early MIT culture.
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.
Margaret Hamilton was 1,000% a hacker. She basically pioneered the foundations of asynchronous code and was one of the first people to work on rockets at a time when software engineering was in its infancy.
For years, I took piano lessons from an incredible teacher in Seattle who actually happens to be Margaret Hamilton’s sister. Looking back, I had no idea just how deeply she would impact both me and my family.
It's absolutely appropriate; the people downvoting those comments would absolutely say negative things, potentially even jubilant and gleeful things, on the occasion of the death of someone they thought was bad. Pointing out that Margaret Hamilton's impact on the Apollo program is overstated somewhat because a lot of people want to promote the stories of early female programmers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
your comment is being shadowbanned too from what I see. How do we know 'she' was real at all? (let alone did all those amazing, yet unprobable things.)
How's the saying go? "if you know what someone's religion then find out who you are not allowed to criticize."? (or something like that)
Not the time and place to spread what's obviously lies. She might have gotten too much credit for certain things, but the "facts" presented there are twisted or plain wrong (like her not working there until years later).
Don Eyles has a book, "Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir". It has a footnote:
> 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.
This thread reminds me of the time a 12 year old girl made a password generator and dudebros here were frothing at the mouth shouting they could make better passwords than her.
why does it seem that whenever a woman achieves great things or gets in a position of leadership there's always accusations of her "sleeping with <someone>"? woman are apparently incapable of getting anywhere or doing anything without sleeping their way to the top
Hamilton, specifically, seems to have a number of "anti-fans" who seem religiously convinced she didn't do much of anything. They have a few talking points, but they totally ignore sources _from the Apollo era_. She was interviewed in 1969 about the software, wrote a letter in 1971 explaining the computer failure mode on Apollo 11, and is mentioned as important in several memoirs from decades before these people claim she was "retroactively" lionized.
The linked Twitter thread https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200 does suggest that the specific woman Margaret Hamilton was promoted to her position by the man she married (Dan Lickly), shortly before marrying him. Which, as the thread points out, does seem rather nepotistic.
I think projects like Apollo are important in a way that they let extraordinary people to use their capabilities.
I feel from personal experiences as well as from many close people that often the corporate world really struggles on dealing with talent. And I don't mean autistic savants doing obscure things but relatively normal but very competent people doing actual well based comprehensive business helping work - but you have to do something in a very dumbed down way because the organization is built in a way to only accept small changes to the state of the art.
It's not just "can these organizations produce brilliant output?" but "can they produce quality output?" I think you can take a lot of pride in doing ordinary things properly and giving people good experiences.
I stayed at a major chain hotel this weekend and it was a fine stay, the staff was great, but... there were just numerous little tech problems. Like the USB chargers had bad connections so I plugged in my phone overnight and it didn't charge and the next morning I found I had to twist the connector to get it to work. And then when I tried to connect to the WiFi with a Steam Deck [1] it wanted my personal info to join their rewards program, but the complicated Javascript-based dropdown menu to pick a state barely worked and after a minute of screwing with it I was able to pick the wrong state but not pick my real state so I looked up a zip code in that state and entered it.
When I got home I got an email from "no-reply@thathotelchainfoundedbyparishiltonsgreatgrandfather.com" gushing about how they want me to have the perfect experience and how badly they want to hear from me. Like yeah, they want me to call their 800 number and give me a piece of my mind.
It bugs me because I spend my day fixing problems with Javascript apps and I know all about those overcomplicated dropdowns. I get the feeling that if a staff member screwed up they'd be held accountable but people act like technology problems are like the weather and there is nothing we can do about it.
[1] granted an unusual device BUT... I don't travel with a laptop anymore, don't need to connect my phone with WiFi in 5G country and may or may not connect my iPhone. They could have just used the <select> that comes with HTML and it would have "just worked" and today you have so many options to style those with CSS
Yeah, something like the Apollo project has an exciting and profound enough destination/vision that it acts like a forcing function that herds all the cats.
The thing I've taken away most from my multidecade career is that the hardest part is getting any group of people all marching in the same direction, of their own volition. Everyone's motivations always differ. And leadership that just tries to force one direction almost always fails to consider enough viewpoints. And the alternatives, a deliberate rhizomatic chaos, or cutthroat competition, can be entirely demoralizing.
I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.
Thanks for sharing this story from this point of view so genuinely. I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would enjoy any comments under this sad news.
Related:
Margaret Hamilton Led the NASA Software Team That Landed Astronauts on the Moon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735912 - Dec 2014 (94 comments)
I will forever keep the image in my mind of her standing next to the Apollo program code books.
https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
Margaret Hamilton actually coined the term "software engineer" IIRC. Rest in peace
She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html
out of curiosity, how'd you get your hands on the textbook?
This is incredible, thanks a lot for making it available for us.
Little did she know, the term would be co-opted by guys changing the color of a button on a web site.
And gate-kept by just as many. I wonder what she'd take more issue with. My understanding is she wanted to elevate people who work on software, not draw a line around it.
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And then other guys made frontend dev tooling so complicated that it does actually require a software engineer to change the color of a button.
... an audacious choice of words according to the Austrian association of (real) engineers that get all red-faced and jittery even thinking about it! These peasants, bah, they can't even...
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It becomes engineering when the software is flying to the moon and back.
Grace Hopper would like to show you her collection of nanoseconds.
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IMO social engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
That's not how language works.
Quite a few practical constraints on software are imposed by the physical world and our current ability to construct devices out of it. Working within those constraints to provide value that people can depend on isn't the worst definition of engineering I've heard.
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I hope you don’t write your own crypto.
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It's not too soon to delete this, dude. The tone of this statement is cynical, reductive, and dismissive. I bet you're fun at parties.
There is a very nice oral history the Computer History Museum produced: https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-ow...
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.
A fascinating potential link between the two famous popular books on early computing and mathematics, 'Hackers', and 'Chaos' by James Gleick (two books that shaped my teenage years fwiw).
Is the link to Edward Lorenz just a guess based on the name and subject matter of the project given in the Hackers extract? Or do you have information from some other source that Margaret Hamilton wrote code for Lorenz?
Check out starting on page 10: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Edit; It looks like I misremembered the machine. Seems like it was the PDP 1.
It's fascinating she was at the intersection of so many foundational points.
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That page is 403, but I was able to get it at https://web.archive.org/web/20161220114912/http://opentransc...
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.
On Margaret Hamilton from Chapter 5 of Hackers by Steven Levy
"She was well aware of the hackers’ playfulness around the ninth floor, and she was moderately friendly with some of them, even though they would eventually blend into one collective personality in her memory: one unkempt, though polite, young male whose love for the computer had made him lose all reason."
I had to go to an archive site to actually read it; the link says 403 forbidden. I don't really see this as toxic masculinity just because the officially sanctioned user was female. Just an honest mistake - they did test their mod, just not enough for all possible use cases of the computer.
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Hamilton invented the idea of error handling in software, and that error handling in the Apollo computer is why Buzz Aldrin was able to handle the error 1201/1202 in the minutes before the Eagle landed on the moon, instead of having to abort the mission.
Certainly that could be described as "error handling", but I would describe what saved the landing as priority scheduling combined with restart protection.
You are misremembering something you read. Software written in 1950s already had error handling in it.
I wonder if that was just an outgrowth of NASA's "plan for failure" ethos.
But, I also wonder if that ethos was apart of early NASA before they had failures to learn from... Hmm...
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Assume it’s not obvious and offer an interesting contribution, such as an alternative.
Her story and her work is so inspiring. And I feel a bit sad reading about it...
When I started working on this field I dreamt of working on things like that. Not sending anything to the moon, but code that would achieve difficult stuff, challenging tasks, things I would be proud of.
Today I mostly do silly APIs, and with AI is worse and worse... I wonder if there are still jobs where you have to do novel stuff, new algorithms, more like a scientific approach to the code, instead of just deploy the same thing every other company has already done.
I would suggest to go work for Hardware startups and deep-tech. Think quantum computing, advanced robotics, fusion/nuclear, new space. Most of the algorithms ran there are constrained and new, and having a physical system with limited computation/speed makes for a interesting challenge, while still "achieving difficult stuff".
Yes, there are still jobs where you have to do novel and interesting things. It is hard to compare these to the work the Draper Lab did, but that was an exceptional moment in time that an exceptional group of people were able to do because they were at the right place at the right time.
Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.
When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.
Some people hate palantir, but that is their philosophy. That smart people should be helping to solve problems for the government rather than just working on selling more ads.
May I recommend Caleb Hearth's Don't get distracted ?
https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
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Unfortunately often the problem seems to be how a government can do more evil.
I mean there are better ways to help society if you are smart and like challenging software projects.
Dang. She was a remarkable stand-out, in fields full of remarkable people.
The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
“There was no choice but to be pioneers” is a great line.
At the dawning of the technological age that would change the word in some many ways. Like the quote infers, everything they did was something nobody had before.
You think of the immense advantages we have now whereas back then, they had none. Which makes her contributions as a scientist that much heavier and important.
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First thing I thought of, too. "Who? ...Wait, not the cool book chick!"
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...
The term she coined for it was "man-rated". Meaning that it had been tested rigorously enough to be trusted to keep humans alive.
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.
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That is an excellent article and I’d like to read more. Are there other resources about the shuttle software development or projects with a similar level of software engineering?
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she was a straight up fox too, and I can't imagine she'd be offended by that, I mean call me a fox I promise I won't be offended.
also, she should not be confused with the other Margaret Hamilton you might recall
https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/35-facts-about-...
Yeah, no wonder she married her Apollo boss who promoted her into the famed software lead position.
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> The pic here is often people's first intro to her
Why link to an article instead of an actual picture?
The page you linked failed to show any image without JS enabled (although my ad blocker might share some of the blame, there are a handful of trackers on that site) and the article doesn't link directly to it either. I'm guessing you mean the pic here: https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...
I previously made a short comic about Margaret Hamilton and her work on the Apollo flight software: https://fosscomics.com/posts/5.%20The%20Beginning%20of%20Sof... Sharing it again in her memory. May she rest in peace.
I like it, thanks for sharing!
Also the name of the actress who played Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz, who died in 1985.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(actress)
I am pleased to have now learned more about the Margaret Hamilton of "software engineering."
Yeah, when I first saw the headline, I was momentarily confused because I thought she was already dead and didn’t know that she had a career beyond acting but then anything is possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr
I feel very sad. I always wished I could meet her and have a little talk. She'll be forever remembered thanks to that coolest badass picture of her. Om shanti!
"Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust."
If only!
I am extremely sorry to hear of Ms. Hamilton's passing. I will be sure to tell my daughters in the morning. I told them a bit about her. They found the life size cardboard cutout at the Computer History Museum in Roswell, GA, very interesting. They love the Apollo section of the exhibit.
RIP. I'll always remember her iconic pic with the stack of printed code
her pic with the stack of printed code will always be iconic.
rest well pioneer.
I don't usually correct this, but in her iconic photo she's standing next to printed output of an Apollo simulator run, not the actual source code for the AGC or lunar module.
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.
These computers didn't have much program or data storage space. The source code can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11
thanks for the correction. learnt something new.
May her memory be a blessing
Weird, I was thinking about her monumental achievement just a few hours ago.
She was an excellent leader in a time when women were not commonly in leadership roles. She clearly understood coding and perhaps changed the way the field viewed the importance of software. Did she do any coding that was monumental herself? All I can find is fluff pieces. She managed a team that developed the code for Apollo 11. She did not write all the code in the famous pictures. Did she write some of it or just guide the team in the right direction?
She assumed management of the team after most of the code was written. She probably did something cool, but almost certainly not as much the praise articles of the last 15(?) years would like you to believe.
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An absolute titan, a true pioneer. RIP.
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RIP
Why didn't they add her most famous photo in the article!
Margaret, along with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, was such a huge inspiration to me as a young engineer. I'm honored to be in a field pioneered by women such as them, even if it's turned into a male-dominated field today. Rest in peace to a real legend.
Fun Fact: "Computer" was a profession before it was a thing. Computers did math on complex systems, often with the help of sin/cos/tan tables and the like. And they were usually women.
Vale.
One of the founders of our industry.
Is any of the original Apollo code available to read?
https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11
thank you!
Not a direct answer to your question per se, but I would wholeheartedly recommend Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" (ISBN 978-1-4419-0876-6).
It reads like a lead engineer walking a new hire through the codebase.
This is a great recommendation. And considering the code base is in assembly, I'll gladly welcome a walkthrough.
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According to Wikiquote, she coined the phrase "software engineering": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton
> 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.
timmg's video explaining how the AGC worked is one of the better ones I've seen, if you actually want to understand in detail.
There are a number of hobbyists who specialize in restoring components of the Apollo computer systems. They do some very impressive work and there are lots of cool demo videos on Youtube.
mission critical software: plan for the impossible to keep the possible running smoothly
RIP legend.
Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also https://findingada.com/.
I've talked a lot about PRIDE, Milt Bryce's information-systems methodology that was perhaps the first commercially available, rigorous methodology for developing software and the first serious attempt to transform information systems development in the commercial sector from an arcane art into a proven, repeatable science. It really has few forbears.
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.
A link has been removed from other comments which argues with primary sources that she did not participate in the moon landing project to the extent suggested here. Her rise in popularity coincided with a Wikipedia effort to identify "overlooked heroes" in math and science.
Not surprisingly, the comments are being downvoted and flagged.
"Truth does not mind being questioned. A lie does not like being challenged."
Oh so that's were Hamiltonian graph are coming from?
I think that's named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rowan_Hamilton
Rest in peace, Ma'am.
Rest in peace, Margaret.
Rip legend
RIP, what a fantastic person she was.
This feels like a black bar event. RIP Margaret Hamilton.
Definitely worthy of a black bar. She was a pioneer of making software quality into a formal discipline.
Absolutley does
Came here to say this.
Every time I hear some idiot say we couldn’t have gone to the Moon because the computers weren’t powerful enough I’m reminded just how many men are dumber than Margaret Hamilton.
Sad!
It is Dr. Margaret Hamilton, she has earned it.
NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/obituaries/margaret-hamil...
NXVI
The word legend is used too much. She absolutely qualifies.
congrats on being the 50M HN item, probably not legendary though
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000000
Huh. Wow. My comically (physically) large check is on the way I hope!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...
Threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
This definitely asks for a black ribbon on top of HN.
What a loss!
100%
Tangent: Her LEGO minifig next to the Apollo code is one of my, and my daughter’s, favorites.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/women-of-nasa-21312
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This feels like the top honor.
It's my favorite set I own, more than any of the big NASA builds. We've lost a real legend, there will never be another Margaret Hamilton.
Yes please, This is absolutely necessary
Cannot agree more! What a loss for all CS!
Good Lord yes
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A somewhat odd question and the best we can do is theorize and come up with opinions gathered from those who knew or associated with her. Maybe others who worked with her will comment here. We do know that the people who worked at the Draper Lab were "hackers" given one definition of hackers as a group of people who were fascinated with computers and systems that interconnected them. The Draper folks were certainly part of that early MIT culture.
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.
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Guess it's no surprise hackernews has forgotten what a hacker is. Hint: Margaret Hamilton was a hacker.
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Margaret Hamilton was 1,000% a hacker. She basically pioneered the foundations of asynchronous code and was one of the first people to work on rockets at a time when software engineering was in its infancy.
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What's your definition of "hacker"
In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
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Your point? Whatever her opinion, her contributions are undeniable.
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For years, I took piano lessons from an incredible teacher in Seattle who actually happens to be Margaret Hamilton’s sister. Looking back, I had no idea just how deeply she would impact both me and my family.
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It's absolutely appropriate; the people downvoting those comments would absolutely say negative things, potentially even jubilant and gleeful things, on the occasion of the death of someone they thought was bad. Pointing out that Margaret Hamilton's impact on the Apollo program is overstated somewhat because a lot of people want to promote the stories of early female programmers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
It is not appropriate and downvoting those comments is how one indicates this.
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your comment is being shadowbanned too from what I see. How do we know 'she' was real at all? (let alone did all those amazing, yet unprobable things.)
How's the saying go? "if you know what someone's religion then find out who you are not allowed to criticize."? (or something like that)
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I appreciate a channel that calls itself out. That actually makes the content a little more interesting, because its not hiding what it is.
(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)
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Not the time and place to spread what's obviously lies. She might have gotten too much credit for certain things, but the "facts" presented there are twisted or plain wrong (like her not working there until years later).
wow, that's a lot of hate and presumption.
"presumption"... or evidence?
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on the twitter thread:
"I'm not paying Elon $8 to edit the above tweet."
but they have a verified badge. ok.
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You got some sources there or are you just condescending for the sake of it?
Don Eyles has a book, "Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir". It has a footnote:
> 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.
what would you constitute as a source here? source control logs, or lack of thereof?
I think they might have meant "dissenting" views.
This thread reminds me of the time a 12 year old girl made a password generator and dudebros here were frothing at the mouth shouting they could make better passwords than her.
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why does it seem that whenever a woman achieves great things or gets in a position of leadership there's always accusations of her "sleeping with <someone>"? woman are apparently incapable of getting anywhere or doing anything without sleeping their way to the top
Hamilton, specifically, seems to have a number of "anti-fans" who seem religiously convinced she didn't do much of anything. They have a few talking points, but they totally ignore sources _from the Apollo era_. She was interviewed in 1969 about the software, wrote a letter in 1971 explaining the computer failure mode on Apollo 11, and is mentioned as important in several memoirs from decades before these people claim she was "retroactively" lionized.
The linked Twitter thread https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200 does suggest that the specific woman Margaret Hamilton was promoted to her position by the man she married (Dan Lickly), shortly before marrying him. Which, as the thread points out, does seem rather nepotistic.
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And they're always shocked when they're called out for their misogyny. Because how dare you, I guess?
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.
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