We’ve all been there. You’ve got a high-profile presentation or demonstration of whatever thing you’ve been working on for days, weeks, or even months, and there’s a long anxious moment where you know the thing could break or go sideways.
You can see that moment coming at you like a freight train with only the hope that you did your job properly giving you any assurance that you’re not about to get run over.
We might all have been in a situation where we had to put our trust in our work to hold up and do what it needed to do, but Margaret Hamilton’s work was particularly important — it was responsible for putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July 1969.
When warning lights started going off in the middle of the Eagle module’s descent toward the lunar surface, NASA faced a tough decision: continue with the landing or abort.
As the lead programmer for the Apollo Program’s Guidance Computer, though, Hamilton knew that she and her team had planned for this and they had written code to handle this exact kind of problem.
“It quickly became clear that the software was not only informing everyone that there was a hardware-related problem, but that the software was compensating for it,” Hamilton said on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. “With only minutes to spare, the decision was made to go for the landing.”
Even though Hamilton was just 32 years old at the time, NASA’s mission control staff trusted her software, too. They gave Armstrong and Aldrin the go-ahead to land on the moon, and Hamilton’s error-correcting code saw to it that they were successful.
Early Life and Career
Source: Makers/YouTube
Landing men on the moon with just over 32,000 bits of Random Access Memory (that’s 0.004 megabytes!) probably wasn’t the kind of high-wire act that Margaret Heafield Hamilton imagined for herself growing up in the midwest. Born on August 17, 1936, in the town of Paoli, Indiana, her family soon moved to Michigan where, after graduating high school, she attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for a time.
She soon transferred to Earlham College, back in her birth state of Indiana, though, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, with a minor in philosophy. Hamilton credits the head of the college’s science department, Florence Long, for inspiring her to pursue a career in abstract math.
While at Earlham, Hamilton also met her first husband, James Cox Hamilton, who was a senior at the college, studying chemistry. They married on June 15, 1958, and after her husband graduated from Earlham and the couple moved to Boston. There, they had a daughter, Lauren, in 1959, and Hamilton was all set to enroll in a graduate mathematics program at Brandeis University when fate took a fortuitous turn.
Moving to MIT
Source: MIT Museum
Margaret Hamilton began working with Edward Lorenz, the father of Chaos Theory, in MIT’s meteorology department. As part of her work there, Hamilton learned how to program using the PDP-1 and LGP-30 computers to create predictive models for weather forecasting.
Since computer science and programming weren’t yet established fields that you could study in their own right, early programmers like Hamilton more or less had to learn on the job. “Computer science …….
Source: https://interestingengineering.com/margaret-hamilton-software-engineer-who-saved-the-moon-landing