Comment by EvanAnderson
18 hours ago
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.
Thanks! Truth really is stranger than fiction.
And it seems like she reflected on it quite light-heartedly.
Wow-- I'd forgotten that Levy called Margaret out by name in the book. I also got the machine wrong-- it was the PDP-1, not the TX-0.
[flagged]
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.
https://archive.ph/IAFai for what it's worth.