A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer

Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by danso on Monday July 11, 2016 @12:20PM (#12072125)

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 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.

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by zappo2938 on Monday July 11, 2016 @01:11PM (#12072535)

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?)

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by fusiongyro on Monday July 11, 2016 @03:26PM (#12073630)

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.

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by spectre256 on Monday July 11, 2016 @01:22PM (#12072625)

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...

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by jakub_h on Monday July 11, 2016 @06:13PM (#12075194)

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

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by jakub_h on Monday July 11, 2016 @06:30PM (#12075317)

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.

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by paloaltokid on Monday July 11, 2016 @05:53PM (#12075025)

> (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. :)

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by belorn on Tuesday July 12, 2016 @08:46AM (#12078538)

During the same period in time that women dominated the programming profession, men dominated the teacher profession. Now those two professions has switched places.

Should we just say that all the sexist women went to the teacher profession and pushed out the men, and all the sexist men went to the programming profession and pushed out the women? One thing seem for sure, only recruiting from half the population seem to cause a problem for both the teacher and programming profession.

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by hellomoto998 on Monday July 11, 2016 @01:44PM (#12072808)

You know it might be that being a good programmer is not necessarily moored to sex.

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by jakub_h on Monday July 11, 2016 @06:17PM (#12075221)

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.

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Re:A Glimpse into the Apollo Guidance Computer by nickpsecurity on Monday July 11, 2016 @09:06PM (#12076024)

Here's the company she ran afterward. Most of her time went into 001 Toolkit.

http://htius.com

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