A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
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Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#2Included 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 days of this project was treated like a stepchild and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering; and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science. I had always believed that both art and science were involved in its creation, but at that time most thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term “software engineering” to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering; yet, treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.
Apparently, she's kept off of the social network grid, but would love if someone could convince her to do an AMA.
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#3It's probably worth linking to the prior discussion re: the Github repo itself.
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#4Included 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 men dominating software engineering today isn't about talent or potential, but likely grounded in sexism. If you consider hiring women you double your potential labor pool.
(If you are going to down vote this comment, can you please take a moment to explain why?)
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#5[deleted]
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#6Included 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…
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-Machine-Spacefli...
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#7Interesting 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
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#8Included 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…
You know it might be that being a good programmer is not necessarily moored to sex.
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#9Interesting 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…
Apparently the AGC only had 36,864 words of rom. Looking at a random file from the github repo, each page seems to contain 50 lines. So if you put one instruction (one word) per line you could fit the whole rom inside 738 pages (assuming there's no optimization during assembly). Add some space for the comments and blank lines, and 1516 seems about right.
In any case it's doubtful a single program spanning the whole pile could fit in the AGC rom.
Re: A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer
#10Included 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…
Yes, it was considered to be something like secretarial work. It took a long time for there to be a real appreciation for what programming was going to be like.
The contributions of Hamilton and Hopper during that era suggests to me that when things are new, they are undervalued, and that undervalued professions and undervalued people have a way of finding each other and doing great things.