Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass '60s programmer who saved the moon landing
Something for the old folks (like me) I remember seeing roped memory. I thought this was an intresting insight into just how the Appollo moon lander got it's programming, remember when landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong had to drive himself because the computer was too slow and locked up.
But Hamilton's smile was typical of the sense of intellectual accomplishment in logically programming computers in a new field. (It's good thing she was short, if she were taller they wouldn't have had time to write more code for a higher pile!)
The sense of life illustrated in Hamilton's photos is what has kept so many people up for long hours and overnight so many times again and again building software for ever increasing intellectual challenges -- while the likes of nihilists like Obama were hanging out on drugs, then project their own mentality with the "you didn't build that" nonsense as they seek power over those who _do_ "build that". Computers and electronics in general could make such enormous progress over several decades because the bureaucrats didn't understand it or realize it would, by their premises, be worth controlling. There have been ominous signs that that freedom is now being undermined. You don't find Hamilton's smile under the fist of a Cuffy Meigs.
Software does not physically do anything, let along throw switches or change wiring. Software consists of sequences of instructions read into a computer and interpreted to sequentially change states at the clock rate and in accordance with the possibilities in the instruction set built into the hardware. Computers are not made of millions of physical switches, let alone switches thrown by software, let alone circuits rewired by software. A "switching circuit" refers to changing binary states, not to physical switches and not to "rewiring". Physical switches used for that have not been the basis of "switching circuits" since before World War II when relays were used. There are many ways to represent binary states; the commonly used transistors do so by voltages exceeding a threshold on a continuous characteristic curve, not by acting as literal physical switches.
Is sequential VHDL software, or do you call it firmware because it configures an FPGA rather than being feteched-decoded-executed by a state machine?
Love the "Core" memory note. That stuff was so cool. Non-volatile from the start! Back when 16 bits was the size of a roll of lifesavers.
Necessity was the mother of invention = good code. Today, code is a monstrous pile of resource hungry lines, analogous to the young people today. Anybody else remember the DOS editor, TED, a tiny editor ~8K total, with all the Word Perfect controls...cntl+k+b...cntl+k+k...cntl+k+c...
An excellent explanation of the role of mathematical and logical abstract systems underlying the operation of a computer, as well as the physics of transistors used in them to represent the binary states, is our favorite modern physicist Richard Feynman's Lectures on Computation http://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-C... It goes well beyond the elementary description of computers as "cpu + memory + io" etc, yet is very well presented and understandable.
Simulated was the moon's ground coming up beneath an animated flame.
I do appreciate someone finally telling me about Margaret Hamilton 45 years later.
Thanks, nickursis.
I had also been under the impression that the 60 seconds and 30 seconds were not the time to landing but the time to a fuel level abort.
Earlier in the engineering development of modern American civilization there was a saying about engineering: "The difficult takes a week, the impossible takes a little longer." We don't see that positive attitude nearly enough now as viro nihilists and 7th century religious fanatics morally denounce "development" and "industry" and are pandered to by civilized people who ought to know better.
While all this was going on, they had two false alarms.
I hadn't heard of Ms. Hamilton or how she wrote a custom RTOS of sorts that helped save the landing. Very cool.
nuclear weapons components factory production
system. . we were using knowledgeware code-
writing software. . we only achieved part of the goal,
buying Comets for scheduling the work. . I worked
with one of the Margaret Hamiltons enough that
I proposed marriage. . she married someone else,
and is living happily ever after!!! -- j
.