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diskzero 1 hours ago [-]
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.
WarOnPrivacy 3 hours ago [-]
Dang. She was a remarkable stand-out, in fields full of remarkable people.
Margaret Hamilton actually coined the term "software engineer" IIRC. Rest in peace
catskull 30 minutes ago [-]
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
srcreigh 4 minutes ago [-]
This is incredible, thanks a lot for making it available for us.
penskymaterial 9 minutes ago [-]
Little did she know, the term would be co-opted by guys changing the color of a button on a web site.
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.
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
Allison Parrish talks about this in some depth. Turns out toxic masculinity was an integral part of the old-school "hacker" culture from the jump.
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.
MarkusWandel 2 hours ago [-]
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.
her pic with the stack of printed code will always be iconic.
rest well pioneer.
jshier 3 minutes ago [-]
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. IIRC she was running the simulation side of the lab that produced the LEM guidance software at the time of Apollo 11, and became director of the lab in '71.
Kim_Bruning 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
metadaemon 46 minutes ago [-]
Weird, I was thinking about her monumental achievement just a few hours ago.
schaefer 19 minutes ago [-]
Is any of the original Apollo code available to read?
xtajv 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
throw_m239339 29 minutes ago [-]
RIP, what a fantastic person she was.
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
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.
QuantumAtom 38 minutes ago [-]
May her memory be a blessing
jamiek88 1 hours ago [-]
The word legend is used too much. She absolutely qualifies.
verdverm 24 minutes ago [-]
congrats on being the 50M HN item, probably not legendary though
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.
kragen 29 minutes ago [-]
I think she would consider it insulting to be called a "hacker", and not because she thought the term referred to computer criminals.
omnicognate 49 minutes ago [-]
Guess it's no surprise hackernews has forgotten what a hacker is. Hint: Margaret Hamilton was a hacker.
jxf 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
kragen 34 minutes ago [-]
I'm well aware of her impressive achievements. But she had to share computing resources with the original "hackers", the ones who gave us the word, and I don't think she was very fond of them, or of the hacking approach in general; her ingenuity was great but not especially playful. So I don't think she would want to be memorialized here.
18 minutes ago [-]
oliyoung 1 hours ago [-]
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
> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.
mcmcmc 28 minutes ago [-]
I shudder to think of Stallman’s idea of “playful cleverness”
kragen 6 minutes ago [-]
I suggest reading the linked page to see what he thought was an especially good example. It involved using chopsticks to eat Korean food in an unnecessarily difficult way.
esseph 23 minutes ago [-]
> In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.
I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.
kragen 3 minutes ago [-]
Of course, but none of this is relevant to what Margaret Hamilton thought about hackers, except in the sense that she didn't appreciate people "messing around" with the systems she depended on, in ways that had very little to do with computer security, which wasn't a thing in that context. (Though other researchers on campus were working on it.)
gcheong 1 hours ago [-]
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kragen 1 hours ago [-]
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1 hours ago [-]
kulahan 1 hours ago [-]
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kragen 31 minutes ago [-]
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timmg 2 hours ago [-]
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geuis 2 hours ago [-]
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.)
2 hours ago [-]
acedTrex 2 hours ago [-]
Its unimaginable to me that people think making this kind of stuff public is socially acceptable. You may as well post a picture of your latest bowel movement and tell people to go look at it.
djohnston 2 hours ago [-]
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Nerada 33 minutes ago [-]
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taejavu 31 minutes ago [-]
You got some sources there or are you just condescending for the sake of it?
Yiin 23 minutes ago [-]
what would you constitute as a source here? source control logs, or lack of thereof?
RaoulP 15 minutes ago [-]
I think they might have meant "dissenting" views.
Panino 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
morder 28 minutes ago [-]
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
The pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
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.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...
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.
rest well pioneer.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000000
Threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
What a loss!
Tangent: Her LEGO minifig next to the Apollo code is one of my, and my daughter’s, favorites.
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/blt75c3f3f6b4cb0e7c/2...
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.
In the Hacker News sense, its those of us who use tools to "hack" together solutions, not in the "hack" systems to gain entry
> It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
I do not think that Margaret Hamilton would appreciate her exploration of the limits of what is possible, which was extensive, being described as dedicated to a spirit of playful cleverness.
You may not realize this depending on what computer culture you fell into / timeframe, but they're often the same people.
I know a staggering number of CEOs, CTOs, CISOs that were "messing around" with everything from FBI, NSA, etc sites in their teenage years.
(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)
Maybe some anger at mom