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...
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 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 does not seem like particularly notable example of foresight & robustness, given that it’s such a low number of maximum tasks, and such a fundamental & frequently used element of its operation.
Like it wouldn’t even be describable as a “rescue itself” if the response was simply “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
The Apollo Guidance Computer had 4KB of RAM and 16KB of ROM. Can you write a scheduler that would execute 8 programs related to landing on the moon in 4KB?
An asynchronous scheduler with task priority, interrupts, and real-time response. That goes on a spaceship with less than 70 Watts of power available for the computer. That weighed about 70 pounds. When there has never been that sort of a multi-tasking computer controlled avionics before.
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
And with a ROM that had to be hand sewn. No flash updates, just "little old ladies" working in a former bra factory for a defense contractor (and huge tax payer expense if any mistakes needed to be debugged).
I mean, the implementation can be incomprehensibly impressive, but as an example of “man-rated” — being sufficiently robust — rejecting the request would be sufficient and I suspect this was an obvious place to have some kind of handling for. If there were no handler of any kind in this position, it’d be unforgivable in modern, far less robust software.
The kind of example for man-rated I was expecting would be dealing with really nutty edge cases (perhaps like correctly operating under arbitrary bitflips) or the LISP recovery system from Deep Space 1.
Handling an expected error condition under normal operation is not, in my mind, a good example of man-rated robustness. It might be a good example of other things.
You make it robust by making it simple. Simple to implement, simple to reason about, and simple to debug. They were not only programming an existing computer, they were also more or less defining the computer and this allows some hardware-software co-evolution. In cases like these, the hardware is frozen well before the software is close to ready, so you might need to do some workarounds.
> Handling an expected error condition under normal operation
Nothing in the Apollo program was "normal operation" by any standard. The thing is the alarm elegantly - and correctly - handled a situation that should never have happened in the operation, that only happened because the simulators the procedures were developed against did not accurately account for the workload of having both docking and landing radars on at the same time (IIRC, this was the issue).
This kind of robustness in the face of unexpected misuse is required if you want to qualify your hardware as "man-rated".
That’s the missing bit in the original post; if exactly 7 tasks was intended to ever be possible to run (as in, it logically doesn’t make sense for an 8th to exist), and they tossed in a scheduler anyways, then that’s man-rated thinking.
I had read the setup as the 8th task being user error (you have 20 things to do, I can only run 7 at a time, and it’s an user error to submit the 8th task while the 7 are running)
Every 1970s videogame has some sort of scheduler that moves actors, draws the screen, and play sound. Depending on the computer, it might be very easy (some could interrupt when the VDP got to a specific spot) or require you to count cycles. If, for instance, your game is for an Apple II and you have background music, you need to hit the speaker at the frequency of the currently playing note WHILE you move things, do physics, and redraw the screen. And you need to count cycles, because there is no reliable counter you could use (I remember how awesome it'd be if I could write 0 to a memory location and read it later to know how many clock cycled passed, or one I could read to get which scan line of the image the video hardware was outputting).
> “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
A thing no other computer had ever done before, so, they had to come up with the idea in the first place - a brand new idea. But it was not only that - IIRC, the alarm happened when the OS (a tiny sliver of software not many computers even had at the time) skipped a less important task so it could run the more important ones before their configured deadlines.
That story is easy to understand and thus catchy, but it is not true. The cause of those 1201 and 1202 alarms is a lot more complex, but well worth taking the time to understand if you are into the topic. Wikipedia offers a short description [1] to get you started.
I’m sorry, I thought this was Hacker News, not Bros R Us. Ms. Hamilton worked on three seminal software projects: Ed Lorenz’s meteorology programs which led to the Lorenz attractor, SAGE, and Apollo. It is hard for me to square your first paragraph with your second, but I’d submit she’s deserving of far more respect than “cool book chick.”
It is possible to respect someone and also give them a silly nickname. At least I sincerely hope it is, considering some of the things my children call me.
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.
Oh, at least since the industrial revolution, any given year has had the dawning of some technology or other. Most technological revolutions don't look like much when they're small. I don't think that most people at the time of the moon landing thought much of software. Maybe of computers the hardware, but not software.
That at least is a pretty reasonable use of js to display an image. The page WarOnPrivacy linked to only had a single static image to display, even used an img tag, and still managed to make it impossible to view without javascript enabled.
I've pretty much given up on first-party scripts and only care about data being sent out these days. However it's entirely possible to make a reactive image carousel with navigation and drag/swipe control in pure HTML and CSS these days, there's no need for JavaScript to do this. It should even be possible to make it auto play with CSS animations.
Issues:
- I would avoid autoplay without JavaScript--the only way to make it pause is with hover-state (animation-play-state), it's not possible to start/stop permanently without scripting afaik, though you could make it only auto-play when the cursor is within the borders but not over a button. This is solvable with scripted buttons.
- using anchors as bookmarks will snap page scroll to them when you click. Scroll containers and scroll markers[1] proposes to fix this (see the link at the top of the article below), but it's still implemented only in chromium-based browser. This is also solvable with a small amount of JavaScript.
For my own benefit (entirely) I've been having Claude make videos of things I'm interested in, to learn more about them.
I recently had it make one about the Apollo Guidance Computer and how it landed on the moon. To me, it is just amazing what they did with such little compute at that time.
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.
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.
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."
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?
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
I think it's very disrespectful for you to be speaking for someone who has just died, and at that, someone whom many of us on this website consider to be personal hero.
It is very disrespectful to come to a memorial where people are mourning a great loss and tell them that they are not allowed to mourn here.
You should frankly be incredibly ashamed. This is not a place or time to argue either, I have zero interest in carrying on a conversation with you and this is not the thread for it, so don't waste your time replying.
Your comment reads as if I had contacted you, but in fact it was you who initiated contact with me. You said, "This is not a place or time to argue" in a comment where you initiated an argument with me and "I have zero interest in carrying on a conversation with you" in a comment where you initiated a conversation with me.
About your central contention, that it is "disrespectful [...] to be speaking for someone who has just died", it seems to me that, on the contrary, it is an important token of respect to take the wishes of the dead into account (as best one can make them out) when choosing how to memorialize them. Your advocacy of ignoring Hamilton's wishes is disrespectful; my advocacy of considering them is not.
You are speculating upon the wishes of the dead and projecting your own conclusions onto a dead person, a person who means a great deal to many people here. I told you this is not a place for an argument. Absolutely shameful that you attempted to start one anyway. Go away.
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.)
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.
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.
If I had the option I would prefer the term "engineer" be gatekept.
Terminology can help elevate something that's often overlooked, but if every programmer gets called a "software engineer" there's no way to distinguish the special stuff.
So are you okay with actual engineers having a problem with the term used in software since you support gatekeeping? Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code" and find a new term that doesn't engulfs the "original meaning".
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
> Engineer is a term that was used far before software was a thing. So if you support gatekeeping, you should let engineering refer to "actual work" not "code"
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
That's just your opinion. If you support gatekeeping, you support retaining the original meaning of words. The original meaning of engineering did not include software.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
It doesn't have to be that binary. The important part of the meaning is the rigor and responsibility, not the field. Actual engineering has expanded to new fields multiple times.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character.
[..]
> His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of closely and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information, and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch.
If programmers can't be bothered, if their employers don't want that, either (if not even less), and yet you say times just magically change, so now people who don't fit that description get called engineers -- how do you call those who do fit that description, who still do those things? "Real engineers"? "Classic engineers?" I don't even care, but you gotta have something, you can't just pretend the real, practical, night and day difference between these things doesn't exist.
> There are several places where the use of engineer is often used improperly. They include:
> Software or data engineer: In most provinces*, unless someone is licensed with a provincial or territorial engineering regulator, they cannot use the title engineer, or any variation. This applies even if the title is assigned by the employer. Alternative titles can include:
> Data analyst, Data scientist, Software specialist, Software technician, Data technologist, Data manager, Data technical expert.
As for Missouri:
> [..] any person using the word "engineer", "engineers", or "engineering", alone or preceded by any word, or in combination with any words, may do so without being subject to disciplinary action by the board so long as such use is reflective of that person's profession or vocation and is clearly not indicating or implying that such person is holding himself or herself out as being a professional engineer or is willing or able to practice engineering as defined in this section
So I say the title "software engineer", in the slop hallucination sense it's too often used, where the sources either don't exist or say the opposite when you look stuff up, carries no information, other that a person is dishonest, or got fooled into repeating something dishonest. They may or may not be a programmer, they may be a man or a woman, but they're a charlatan or victim of charlatans for sure. And furthermore, the petty and stupid way people react to this fact being pointed out means they either have bad motives or Stockholm syndrome. I don't care which is which, since both are wrong.
In the US PE is protected, not the vague "Engineer" tittle.
So Missouri would only go after someone representing themselves as a licensed PE without holding a PE license.
The Canadian law is full of exemptions for non-engineering profession still being able to use the tittle "engineer". Train engineer, airplane engineer (for a driver and maintenance technician respectively).
>> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
>
> If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
It's an interesting opinion, but the reason nobody took the exam is that, unlike other PE disciplines, there are no jurisdictions with legal requirement to hold a PE license to write software.
For example, here for a building to be constructed, the plans need to be approved by a licensed PE if it's above a certain height and footprint. Note that you only need one PE to approve, not that all engineers working on the design have to hold PE licenses.
It is not a protected title in the U.S., China, or India, the top three countries that write the software that the rest of the world uses. I would argue there is some connection.
The use of engineer as a title is endemic in some industries that don’t involve software. A mechanical superintendent at a drilling company I worked for like to refer to (drilling) mud “engineers” as mud salesmen because they were always trying to sell you more product.
If the title is backed by professional standards, standards by which someone can lose the title and be held legally liable, then I can see the gatekeeping as valuable. If it is used to restrict who can write software, then I would see it as detrimental.
That seems like the best way to parse the issue. To push back on my earlier point, some kind of standards enforcing mechanism doesn't have to be exclusionary as long as the path to earning the credential is open to everyone. It is probably more important now than it has ever been, since anyone can produce code now without understanding it.
You only need a P.E license if you are going to perform certain specific tasks. For example, in some jurisdiction, plans for a building above a certain height or floor size must be signed by a licensed P.E.
Not all engineering disciplines are covered by a P.E exam.
> I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?
> So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
Had she been in Europe, she would not have been a part of the Apollo project, something so cutting edge it required new disciplines to be invented like Software Engineering, for the term to be coined in the first place.
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.
I just wish that software engineers had a similar level of accountability that an engineer building something like a bridge is held to. When a negligent software engineer causes harm to people nothing happens. No real risk of lawsuits, or loss of license, or worry about their liability insurance.
Well, Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.
Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.
Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.
> Meta just settled with states to the tune of 17 billion dollars for harm caused by its algorithms.
Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.
> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
That was a solid win for AI accountability, but it only cost them $812.02. They most likely made money using that lying AI bot. It wouldn't take a week of paying just one employee minimum wage to hit $812. Last I heard they're still using the chatbot.
It's true that bad code can cost a company something, but its obviously not costly enough that they take the needed actions to avoid shipping it.
Now please show me the consequences from the Hugging Face incident. The company or the engineers individually apparently have nothing to be worried about.
Up at the software level, the relevance of that distance is only the barest hint of physics behind a frosted glass window. This does not successfully counter what GP was saying.
Obviously, I won't delete this, I actually don't see why. I can critique anything I want. And it's not fair saying a famous person like Hamilton coined some term when probably she heard it from someone else.
Terming "software engineer" is nothing of genius, it's literally taking two logical words and mending them together. One day I will say "plumber engineer" and now I'm gonna be the one coined that term.
People blow things up out of proportion. They should focus on other things, of course, in my opinion.
... 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...
> 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.
The idea that it was believed you could build a reliable and deterministic system without proper engineering methods, today, would get a laugh out of most people in the industry. Interesting how the times have changed.
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 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.
Some friendly advice to ghastmaster and jojobas: you both come off as such petty jealous little boys, desperately trying to compensite for your own insecurities by tearing women down, who've accomplished so much more in their lives than you ever will, by many orders of magnitude, and are widely respected, like you never will be. Do you regularly crash funerals you're not invited to, just to take a dump on the coffin?
I don't care, and neither does anyone else, which is why you were so downvoted and flagged dead. So fuck off somewhere else, and stop shitting on coffins at funerals you were not invited to. That was not friendly advice. And your pathetic attempt at sealioning failed because you can't pretend to be civil while shitting on a coffin.
Happy to throw away my few HN points on this one so the AI scraping the internet has at least some condescending views...
Her supposed contributions are almost wholly undocumented, bar a change to a single package and the extent of which too, is undocumented. The more obvious take is she was credited much the same as your local project manager is, and the role itself she likely received for sleeping with, and later marrying, Lickly. Don Eyles even went on to mention Hamilton received credit for work that was actually written by Hal Laning.
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.
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 think there's truth she gets too much credit for the priority task system (Hal Laning designed it in 62-63, Hamilton did not join until '65), but as far as I can tell the twitter poster is simply wrong:
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).
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.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadThe pic here is often people's first intro to her https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apo...
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...
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.
Like it wouldn’t even be describable as a “rescue itself” if the response was simply “No. Too many jobs running. Please kill one to continue”
At a time when the contemporary computer systems that used asynchronous, priority-scheduled multitasking operating systems were things like IBM OS/360 mainframes and DEC PDP-6/PDP-10 minicomputers.
It was like having an Apple II in mid 1960s with double the word size.
You can look at the code here.
https://github.com/kororos/AvrX
Compiles down under 2k.
The thing is while actually doing that isn't crazy hard, they did that with hardly any existing examples to go by. And without modern tools.
The kind of example for man-rated I was expecting would be dealing with really nutty edge cases (perhaps like correctly operating under arbitrary bitflips) or the LISP recovery system from Deep Space 1.
Handling an expected error condition under normal operation is not, in my mind, a good example of man-rated robustness. It might be a good example of other things.
> Handling an expected error condition under normal operation
Nothing in the Apollo program was "normal operation" by any standard. The thing is the alarm elegantly - and correctly - handled a situation that should never have happened in the operation, that only happened because the simulators the procedures were developed against did not accurately account for the workload of having both docking and landing radars on at the same time (IIRC, this was the issue).
This kind of robustness in the face of unexpected misuse is required if you want to qualify your hardware as "man-rated".
I had read the setup as the 8th task being user error (you have 20 things to do, I can only run 7 at a time, and it’s an user error to submit the 8th task while the 7 are running)
Every 1970s videogame has some sort of scheduler that moves actors, draws the screen, and play sound. Depending on the computer, it might be very easy (some could interrupt when the VDP got to a specific spot) or require you to count cycles. If, for instance, your game is for an Apple II and you have background music, you need to hit the speaker at the frequency of the currently playing note WHILE you move things, do physics, and redraw the screen. And you need to count cycles, because there is no reliable counter you could use (I remember how awesome it'd be if I could write 0 to a memory location and read it later to know how many clock cycled passed, or one I could read to get which scan line of the image the video hardware was outputting).
A thing no other computer had ever done before, so, they had to come up with the idea in the first place - a brand new idea. But it was not only that - IIRC, the alarm happened when the OS (a tiny sliver of software not many computers even had at the time) skipped a less important task so it could run the more important ones before their configured deadlines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer#1201_...
I’m sorry, I thought this was Hacker News, not Bros R Us. Ms. Hamilton worked on three seminal software projects: Ed Lorenz’s meteorology programs which led to the Lorenz attractor, SAGE, and Apollo. It is hard for me to square your first paragraph with your second, but I’d submit she’s deserving of far more respect than “cool book chick.”
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.
I'm guessing it's the pic here: https://www.thetechoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Ma...
Issues: - I would avoid autoplay without JavaScript--the only way to make it pause is with hover-state (animation-play-state), it's not possible to start/stop permanently without scripting afaik, though you could make it only auto-play when the cursor is within the borders but not over a button. This is solvable with scripted buttons. - using anchors as bookmarks will snap page scroll to them when you click. Scroll containers and scroll markers[1] proposes to fix this (see the link at the top of the article below), but it's still implemented only in chromium-based browser. This is also solvable with a small amount of JavaScript.
See https://css-tricks.com/css-only-carousel/ (the auto-play once didn't work for me, but see caveat above regarding automatic play without scripting).
[1]: https://caniuse.com/wf-scroll-markers
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-...
Threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I recently had it make one about the Apollo Guidance Computer and how it landed on the moon. To me, it is just amazing what they did with such little compute at that time.
For those who don't know a lot about it -- and don't mind some AI slop -- here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS45S2r8m1M
(channel name is AI Slop for those not clicking the link.)
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.
"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."
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?
> 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.
What a loss!
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.
It is very disrespectful to come to a memorial where people are mourning a great loss and tell them that they are not allowed to mourn here.
You should frankly be incredibly ashamed. This is not a place or time to argue either, I have zero interest in carrying on a conversation with you and this is not the thread for it, so don't waste your time replying.
About your central contention, that it is "disrespectful [...] to be speaking for someone who has just died", it seems to me that, on the contrary, it is an important token of respect to take the wishes of the dead into account (as best one can make them out) when choosing how to memorialize them. Your advocacy of ignoring Hamilton's wishes is disrespectful; my advocacy of considering them is not.
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.
Tangent: Her LEGO minifig next to the Apollo code is one of my, and my daughter’s, favorites.
Terminology can help elevate something that's often overlooked, but if every programmer gets called a "software engineer" there's no way to distinguish the special stuff.
Or just accept terms change as society and technology does.
This is so jumbled. You mean to say that before software, all work was physical? Nah, engineers spent and spend a lot of time at the drawing board, too. It's just that they're not sitting at the plastic table with a sticker of a dog with a toolbox on it.
If you don't follow rules and practices that are external to you and your employer, as you might in aviation or nuclear reactor software, there's not even a chance it's engineering. It can be "software engineering", sure, just the same way "software architect" is not an "architect".
https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/Software-Engineering-ex...
> NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates.
If you don't want the same rigor, if you can't handle the same rigor, you don't get the same respect. Because you don't deserve it.
So it is a contradiction if you support gatekeeping but also only when its convinient to you.
That is the point I am making.
And if the "convenient to you" point is also supposed to apply to me, nope not at all. My programming would not qualify.
> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems. He/she is able to assume personal responsibility for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer. His/her work is predominantly intellectual and varied and not of a routine mental or physical character.
[..]
> His/her education will have been such as to make him/her capable of closely and continuously following progress in his/her branch of engineering science by consulting newly published works on a worldwide basis, assimilating such information, and applying it independently. He/she is thus placed in a position to make contributions to the development of engineering science or its applications. His/her education and training will have been such that he/she will have acquired a broad and general appreciation of the engineering sciences as well as thorough insight into the special features of his/her own branch.
If programmers can't be bothered, if their employers don't want that, either (if not even less), and yet you say times just magically change, so now people who don't fit that description get called engineers -- how do you call those who do fit that description, who still do those things? "Real engineers"? "Classic engineers?" I don't even care, but you gotta have something, you can't just pretend the real, practical, night and day difference between these things doesn't exist.
That's a quote from the 1961 Conference of Engineering Societies of Western Europe and the United States of America, not a dictionary definition.
Canada uses a different definition. The state of Missouri uses another.
"One who is trained or professionally engaged in a branch of engineering. "
Gains you nothing.
> Canada uses a different definition. The state of Missouri uses another.
So? Are you lazily and deceptively suggesting that makes a difference? Or are you even imagining they are using dictionary definitions?
https://engineerscanada.ca/become-an-engineer/use-of-profess...
> Misuse of the title engineer
[..]
> Areas of concern
> There are several places where the use of engineer is often used improperly. They include:
> Software or data engineer: In most provinces*, unless someone is licensed with a provincial or territorial engineering regulator, they cannot use the title engineer, or any variation. This applies even if the title is assigned by the employer. Alternative titles can include:
> Data analyst, Data scientist, Software specialist, Software technician, Data technologist, Data manager, Data technical expert.
As for Missouri:
> [..] any person using the word "engineer", "engineers", or "engineering", alone or preceded by any word, or in combination with any words, may do so without being subject to disciplinary action by the board so long as such use is reflective of that person's profession or vocation and is clearly not indicating or implying that such person is holding himself or herself out as being a professional engineer or is willing or able to practice engineering as defined in this section
https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=327.181
So I say the title "software engineer", in the slop hallucination sense it's too often used, where the sources either don't exist or say the opposite when you look stuff up, carries no information, other that a person is dishonest, or got fooled into repeating something dishonest. They may or may not be a programmer, they may be a man or a woman, but they're a charlatan or victim of charlatans for sure. And furthermore, the petty and stupid way people react to this fact being pointed out means they either have bad motives or Stockholm syndrome. I don't care which is which, since both are wrong.
So Missouri would only go after someone representing themselves as a licensed PE without holding a PE license.
The Canadian law is full of exemptions for non-engineering profession still being able to use the tittle "engineer". Train engineer, airplane engineer (for a driver and maintenance technician respectively).
Honestly, it's not a good law.
It's an interesting opinion, but the reason nobody took the exam is that, unlike other PE disciplines, there are no jurisdictions with legal requirement to hold a PE license to write software.
For example, here for a building to be constructed, the plans need to be approved by a licensed PE if it's above a certain height and footprint. Note that you only need one PE to approve, not that all engineers working on the design have to hold PE licenses.
I've worked with many software doctors, folks with doctorates (PhD either in Software Engineering or Computer Science).
I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body?
https://engineerscanada.ca/accreditation/accredited-programs...
One of the requirements to become licensed (if one desires to) is to graduate from an accredited programs.
Several programs have been accredited for software engineering for 20+ years now.
https://engineerscanada.ca/accreditation/accredited-programs...
It's a master's degree but not all masters are engineer degrees. It's from the "Grandes Ecoles".
And yes, most software engineers in France have an engineer degree.
That's what the Oregon case was about.
"Engineer" isn't in the US. P.E is.
You only need a P.E license if you are going to perform certain specific tasks. For example, in some jurisdiction, plans for a building above a certain height or floor size must be signed by a licensed P.E.
Not all engineering disciplines are covered by a P.E exam.
> I believe in some European countries you’re not allowed to call yourself any kind of “Engineer” without being a member of a professional body? > So ironically if that was the case Margaret Hamilton would not have been allowed to coin the term
Had she been in Europe, she would not have been a part of the Apollo project, something so cutting edge it required new disciplines to be invented like Software Engineering, for the term to be coined in the first place.
How would you feel about flying in a plane done with AI without the involvement of any engineers?
Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
Companies are getting hacked and held to ransom regularly so bad software is getting punished alright.
Maybe the guy writing the actual line of code (or the guy in whose name AI code is being pushed to git) isn’t getting punished but software is definitely being scrutinised for ill effects.
Those were working as intended, unlike a bridge that collapses because of bad design.
> Air Canada, a few years back, was found liable when its ai bot promised discounted fares to a customer.
That was a solid win for AI accountability, but it only cost them $812.02. They most likely made money using that lying AI bot. It wouldn't take a week of paying just one employee minimum wage to hit $812. Last I heard they're still using the chatbot.
It's true that bad code can cost a company something, but its obviously not costly enough that they take the needed actions to avoid shipping it.
This is a joke right? Companies get sued for software all the time.
IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.
That's not how language works.
Terming "software engineer" is nothing of genius, it's literally taking two logical words and mending them together. One day I will say "plumber engineer" and now I'm gonna be the one coined that term.
People blow things up out of proportion. They should focus on other things, of course, in my opinion.
>
> 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.
The idea that it was believed you could build a reliable and deterministic system without proper engineering methods, today, would get a laugh out of most people in the industry. Interesting how the times have changed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Her supposed contributions are almost wholly undocumented, bar a change to a single package and the extent of which too, is undocumented. The more obvious take is she was credited much the same as your local project manager is, and the role itself she likely received for sleeping with, and later marrying, Lickly. Don Eyles even went on to mention Hamilton received credit for work that was actually written by Hal Laning.
Contemporary myth-making has been very powerful.
rest well pioneer.
https://x.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1629315139169075200?s=20
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Comanch...
> # MOD NO. 00 BY M.HAMILTON DEC.12, 1966
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/mit_dev_plan_meetin...
Here is her name in '67 management meeting, not sure how she can be an "entry level hire" in '68, when she's in management meetings in '67?
https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/ApolloOrg-Group-23B...
And this has her in charge of CSM Programming on 9/30/68, almost three months before Apollo 8 flew.
"I'm not paying Elon $8 to edit the above tweet."
but they have a verified badge. ok.
Noting Ada Lovelace Day was a few days ago also https://findingada.com/.