Do you really know Margaret Hamilton? For the aeronautical and engineering achievement of the Apollo 11 program since its birth, 1961 until its completion, 1972, needed the efforts of several scientists. NASA and her associates were meant to drive astronauts out of the Earth's orbit by the Saturn V rocket, orbiting the moon, and eventually landing on the moon.
The Apollo program was also a huge software project. The astronauts used to guide Apollo one electronic computer, which had taken over the navigation and control of the spacecraft. Someone had to program this software…
The software for the computer was written by a team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now called Draper Laboratory) headed by Margaret Hamilton. Below is an amazing photo that shows it next to the code written by her and her colleagues for the guidance of Apollo 11
“In this picture, I'm standing next to source code of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC),” Hamilton tells Vox in an email.
Η procedure για την ουσιαστική κωδικοποίηση των προγραμμάτων ήταν επίπονη. Ο υπολογιστής που χρησιμοποιήθηκε για την καθοδήγηση ήταν γνωστός ως "Core rope memory" wires tied through the metal cores in a specific way to store code in binary.
"If the wire went through the core, that represented one." reports Hamilton. "Around the core represents zero."
These programs were hand-knitted at the manufacturing plant. And because the factory workers were mostly women, the basic core rope memory was referred to by engineers as "LOL memory," which LOL comes from "little old lady."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1334&v=9YA7X5we8ng
The Margaret Hamilton's code was so good that it had forecasted everything, but the overload of the computer threatened the mission as it had no room for the computational work required for landing.
But that was predicted by Hamilton.
The computer was also programmed to restart automatically and almost instantly. That way he could clean up trivial tasks like radar data, ”says author David Mindell. Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
"If the software did not work, the lunar eclipse would not have happened," he said AJS Rayl .
Margaret Hamilton is currently 78 and has the Hamilton Technologies, Inc. a company in Cambridge that founded 1986.
