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A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

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Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#11

Post by paloaltokid »

zappo2938 wrote: post #4
danso wrote: post #2

Included near the bottom of the article is a link to a Spanish outlet's interview with Margaret Hamilton (the lead flight software engineer) that I had only recently discovered: https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who... She gives some general insight to how the code works, but the biggest highlight for me was how she apparently coined the term "software engineering": > Software during the early…

Do you think in the male dominated world of engineering in the middle part of the 20th century that they considering programming to not be a serious discipline in engineering lead to women being hired in positions they would not have if programming carried higher prestige? If so what does this tell us about the contributions made by women like Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers? The issue of m…

> (If you are going to down vote this comment, can you please take a moment to explain why?)

Generally, any comment or story on HN that suggests the presence of sexism in the world of software gets downvoted/flagged. Your account is almost a year old so I'm surprised you didn't know this. :)

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#12

Post by jakub_h »

spectre256 wrote: post #6
zappo2938 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think in the male dominated world of engineering in the middle part of the 20th century that they considering programming to not be a serious discipline in engineering lead to women being hired in positions they would not have if programming carried higher prestige? If so what does this tell us about the contributions made by women like Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers? The issue of m…

Absolutely they considered programming to be not as serious. There's a great book called Digital Apollo by David Mindell[1] that talks about the creation of the Apollo Guidance Computer. One of the stories is of a male manager who, after being put in charge of a team of software developers, asks his wife not to tell any of their friends he was managing a software team. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-…

Actually, it was his wife who asked him (as a joke).

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#13

Post by jakub_h »

danso wrote: post #2

Included near the bottom of the article is a link to a Spanish outlet's interview with Margaret Hamilton (the lead flight software engineer) that I had only recently discovered: https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who... She gives some general insight to how the code works, but the biggest highlight for me was how she apparently coined the term "software engineering": > Software during the early…

There was a whole conference dealing with the same topic at about the same time, organized by the military (http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/NATOReports...) and attended by dozens of people from many institutions. Clearly, it had already been considered a problem by then. Also remember that the mid-1960s were when the OS/360 effort took place, inspiring Fred Brooks' famous book.

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#14

Post by trynewideas »

bluetomcat wrote: post #7

Interesting fact: the listings contain comments indicating page numbers in the form of "# Page [number]". To find the maximum page number, I ran the following one-liner: $ awk '/# Page / { print $3 }' Apollo-11/*.s | sort -gr | head -1 1516 It is often speculated that in the famous photo, Margaret Hamilton is standing next to the pile of the complete source code. However, 1516 pages are far from such a high pile. I w…

Per this interview between Hamilton and Jaime Rubio Hancock (https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who...):

> Q: Was this picture taken during the Apollo project development? When was it taken and who took it?

> A: Here is a description of the photo excerpted from an MIT Draper Lab document:

> > “Taken by the Draper Lab photographer in 1969 (during Apollo 11). Here, Margaret is shown standing beside listings of the software developed by the team she was in charge of, the LM and CM on-board flight software team”.

Hamilton again, in this Vox interview (http://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481/margaret-hamilton-apoll...):

> "In this picture, I am standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code," Hamilton says in an email. "To clarify, there are no other kinds of printouts, like debugging printouts, or logs, or what have you, in the picture."

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#15

Post by jakub_h »

zappo2938 wrote: post #4
danso wrote: post #2

Included near the bottom of the article is a link to a Spanish outlet's interview with Margaret Hamilton (the lead flight software engineer) that I had only recently discovered: https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who... She gives some general insight to how the code works, but the biggest highlight for me was how she apparently coined the term "software engineering": > Software during the early…

Do you think in the male dominated world of engineering in the middle part of the 20th century that they considering programming to not be a serious discipline in engineering lead to women being hired in positions they would not have if programming carried higher prestige? If so what does this tell us about the contributions made by women like Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers? The issue of m…

I think the primary reason may have been that before the advent of stored-program digital computers, vast arrays of people with mechanical calculators were used for computational tasks. When the first digital computers came, the job was still sufficiently easy that the skills were easily transferable - the first electronic digital machines were glorified calculators. Everyone thought that making programs would be trivial so "clerical" people were used. Only when the complexity of software started increasing the scale of the problem became apparent, and a new field was born. And the newly-trained young people who came into a booming field came with a different demographics. The job description changed significantly, it's not (only!) that the same job was suddenly usurped by male applicants.

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#16

Post by jakub_h »

bluetomcat wrote: post #7

Interesting fact: the listings contain comments indicating page numbers in the form of "# Page [number]". To find the maximum page number, I ran the following one-liner: $ awk '/# Page / { print $3 }' Apollo-11/*.s | sort -gr | head -1 1516 It is often speculated that in the famous photo, Margaret Hamilton is standing next to the pile of the complete source code. However, 1516 pages are far from such a high pile. I w…

Certainly different revisions (for different missions). Also remember that surface missions required two different versions of the code: One for the CM and one for the LM.

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#17

Post by [deleted] »

paloaltokid wrote: post #11
zappo2938 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think in the male dominated world of engineering in the middle part of the 20th century that they considering programming to not be a serious discipline in engineering lead to women being hired in positions they would not have if programming carried higher prestige? If so what does this tell us about the contributions made by women like Margaret Hamilton, Grace Hopper, and the ENIAC programmers? The issue of m…

> (If you are going to down vote this comment, can you please take a moment to explain why?) Generally, any comment or story on HN that suggests the presence of sexism in the world of software gets downvoted/flagged. Your account is almost a year old so I'm surprised you didn't know this. :)

[deleted]

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#18

Post by trynewideas »

jakub_h wrote: post #16
bluetomcat wrote: post #7

Interesting fact: the listings contain comments indicating page numbers in the form of "# Page [number]". To find the maximum page number, I ran the following one-liner: $ awk '/# Page / { print $3 }' Apollo-11/*.s | sort -gr | head -1 1516 It is often speculated that in the famous photo, Margaret Hamilton is standing next to the pile of the complete source code. However, 1516 pages are far from such a high pile. I w…

Certainly different revisions (for different missions). Also remember that surface missions required two different versions of the code: One for the CM and one for the LM.

The repo bluetomcat awk'd covers both Luminary (LM) and Comanche (CM).

EDIT: I bet he awk'd it before the repo split the files up; each is more than 1,400 pages. The total number is likely closer to 3,000.

Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

#19

Post by trynewideas »

trynewideas wrote: post #14
bluetomcat wrote: post #7

Interesting fact: the listings contain comments indicating page numbers in the form of "# Page [number]". To find the maximum page number, I ran the following one-liner: $ awk '/# Page / { print $3 }' Apollo-11/*.s | sort -gr | head -1 1516 It is often speculated that in the famous photo, Margaret Hamilton is standing next to the pile of the complete source code. However, 1516 pages are far from such a high pile. I w…

Per this interview between Hamilton and Jaime Rubio Hancock ( https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who... ): > Q: Was this picture taken during the Apollo project development? When was it taken and who took it? > A: Here is a description of the photo excerpted from an MIT Draper Lab document: > > “Taken by the Draper Lab photographer in 1969 (during Apollo 11). Here, Margaret is shown standing bes…

There's also the people who reportedly spoke to Ron Hackler about the photo[1][2], who notes that "they wrote all of the AGC source code on AGC source coding paper".

Such sheets would look like this: http://www.eah-jena.de/~kleine/history/software/IBM360-codin...

And would likely be much less dense than the printouts.

[1] Steve Dolha on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Was-this-pile-of-code-written-by-a-sin...

[2] This imgur post: https://www.quora.com/Was-this-pile-of-code-written-by-a-sin...

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