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How did Margaret Johnson contribute to the software that allowed humans to reach the moon? Provide two examples.

How did Margaret Johnson contribute to the software that allowed humans to reach the moon? Provide two examples.

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How did Margaret Johnson contribute to the software that allowed humans to reach the moon? Provide two examples.

L Font Margaret Hamilton wasn't supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three- year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn she wanted a graduate degree in math. But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly - and digitally-possible. Paragraph As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4- year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo's command module computer. "People used to say to me, "How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?"" Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie- the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was "going to branch left minus" around the hallway. Outsiders didn't have a clue. But at the lab, she says, "I was one of the guys." Then, as now, "the guys dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today's diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier." It might surprise today's software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys' club was, in fact, a mother and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day. "When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.' - Margaret Hamilton As Hamilton's career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by lohn F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code 's first portable computer She became an expert in systems programming and won important Techni "When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn't teach it," Hamilton says. For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander's work. "We had to simulate everything before it flew," Hamilton remembers. Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the "Little Old Ladies," threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible. Apollo flights carried two near-identical machines: one used in the lunar module-the Eagle that landed on the moon - and the other for the command module that carried the astronauts to and from Earth. These 70-pound Apollo computers were portable computers unlike any other. Conceived by MIT engineers such as Hal Laning and Hamilton's boss, Dick Batton, it was one of the first important computers to use integrated circuits rather than transistors. As Mindell tells the story, it was the first computerized onboard navigation system designed to be operated by humans but with "fly-by-wire" autopilot technology-a precursor to the computerized navigation systems that are now standard on jetliners. the copper "ropes" threaded by the The system stored more than 12,000 "words" in its permanent memory Raytheon workers and had 1,024 words in its temporary, erasable memory. "It was the first time that an important computer had been in a spacecraft and given a lot of responsibility for the mission," says Don Eyles, who worked on the lunar module code while at MIT's IL. "We showed that that could be done. We did it in what today seems an incredibly small amount of memory and very slow computation speed." Without it, Neil Armstrong wouldn't have made it to the moon. And without the software written by Hamilton, Eyles, and the team of MIT engineers, the computer would have been a dud. This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, "eating the world." The world didn't think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn't even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. "Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget." Not at first, anyhow. But as the Apollo project unfolded, the centrality of software in accomplishing the mission started to become clear. In 1965, Hamilton became responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. It was an exciting time, and the US was depending on the work that she was doing. But sometimes the pressure kept Hamilton up at night. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she'd suddenly realized was flawed. "I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me. By mid-1968, more than 400 people were working on Apollo's software, because software was how the US was going to win the race to the moon. As it turned out, of course, software was going to help the world do so much more. As Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.
Transcribed Image Text:L Font Margaret Hamilton wasn't supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three- year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn she wanted a graduate degree in math. But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly - and digitally-possible. Paragraph As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4- year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo's command module computer. "People used to say to me, "How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?"" Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie- the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was "going to branch left minus" around the hallway. Outsiders didn't have a clue. But at the lab, she says, "I was one of the guys." Then, as now, "the guys dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today's diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier." It might surprise today's software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys' club was, in fact, a mother and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day. "When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.' - Margaret Hamilton As Hamilton's career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by lohn F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code 's first portable computer She became an expert in systems programming and won important Techni "When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn't teach it," Hamilton says. For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander's work. "We had to simulate everything before it flew," Hamilton remembers. Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the "Little Old Ladies," threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible. Apollo flights carried two near-identical machines: one used in the lunar module-the Eagle that landed on the moon - and the other for the command module that carried the astronauts to and from Earth. These 70-pound Apollo computers were portable computers unlike any other. Conceived by MIT engineers such as Hal Laning and Hamilton's boss, Dick Batton, it was one of the first important computers to use integrated circuits rather than transistors. As Mindell tells the story, it was the first computerized onboard navigation system designed to be operated by humans but with "fly-by-wire" autopilot technology-a precursor to the computerized navigation systems that are now standard on jetliners. the copper "ropes" threaded by the The system stored more than 12,000 "words" in its permanent memory Raytheon workers and had 1,024 words in its temporary, erasable memory. "It was the first time that an important computer had been in a spacecraft and given a lot of responsibility for the mission," says Don Eyles, who worked on the lunar module code while at MIT's IL. "We showed that that could be done. We did it in what today seems an incredibly small amount of memory and very slow computation speed." Without it, Neil Armstrong wouldn't have made it to the moon. And without the software written by Hamilton, Eyles, and the team of MIT engineers, the computer would have been a dud. This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, "eating the world." The world didn't think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn't even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. "Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget." Not at first, anyhow. But as the Apollo project unfolded, the centrality of software in accomplishing the mission started to become clear. In 1965, Hamilton became responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. It was an exciting time, and the US was depending on the work that she was doing. But sometimes the pressure kept Hamilton up at night. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she'd suddenly realized was flawed. "I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me. By mid-1968, more than 400 people were working on Apollo's software, because software was how the US was going to win the race to the moon. As it turned out, of course, software was going to help the world do so much more. As Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.
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