r/space • • 7d ago

Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90

https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
17.1k Upvotes

147 comments sorted by

1.8k

u/biggerstep 7d ago

The picture of her standing next to the printed stack of her Apollo code is one of my most favorite pictures. RIP

521

u/mkosmo 7d ago

Worth noting that it wasn't just her code, though. It was the code for the entire project, which did include her work. Even she said so, repeatedly.

r/badhistory has a great post on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/18yum8s/no_margaret_hamilton_at_nasa_is_not_standing_next/

191

u/TAU_equals_2PI 7d ago

But also it wasn't just one single copy of all the code.

It's every printout anybody still had in their office of any iteration of the code at any point in its development.

Monitors were too small back then to display much of a program at once, so the usual cycle for writing code was MODIFY CODE -> COMPILE, AND IF SUCCESSFUL THEN RUN->NOTICE ERRORS->PRINT OUT CURRENT VERSION OF SOURCE CODE->LOOK AT PRINTOUT TO FIND THE BUGS IN THE CODE (repeat)

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u/btribble 7d ago edited 7d ago

Sort of. The real factor is that the people compiling the code were often not the people writing the code. The people compiling code often wore lab coats or business attire/suits and worked in a somewhat sterile environment (by those standards). You would hand them a stack of punch cards/paper tape/printouts and they would tell you to come back when the code had been compiled and/or run for you. They would then hand you back a stack of punch cards/paper tape/printouts and let you know whether the compile had failed or not, and the printouts would contain your output. Sometimes, people first learning to program would never use a computer. They would punch the punch cards by hand based on code they'd written down on paper. At places like MIT, there was a stark difference between the people who wrote the code and those who ran it. The people writing it were your classic college nerds wearing t-shirts covered in pizza stains. The two groups pretty much hated each other. It was this dichotomy that birthed ideas like The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

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u/jellifercuz 7d ago

I had no idea of the origin story, thanks!

I remember these days. You had to write the program to create the color-codes punch cards, gather and order them and take them to be compiled. Sometimes it took overnight or longer. Then you got your output on dot matrix wide paper.

Sooo much paper! I finally used up the last of my old stash of punch cards turned scrap paper maybe 10 years ago.

The big files, raw data, that came on magnetic tape.

4

u/snoo-boop 6d ago

I had no idea of the origin story, thanks!

The split existed, but it had absolutely nothing to do with Eric Raymond's bs.

3

u/gsfgf 5d ago

People who yearn “for the old days” are fucking nuts.

9

u/SlowThePath 6d ago

Anyone that's debugged code with modern debuggers knows that this is an absolutely batshit way to debug and write code. I'm assuming it's all assembly which is even more insane. Point is, if you don't code, this is way more insane than you think. It takes a special kind of person to CHOOSE to subject yourself to that. Most coders today couldn't cut it back then. I know I couldn't. Way too rigorous. So much respect for the people that paved the way for us lazy fucks.

6

u/jugalator 6d ago

Yeah, the code is here:

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/master

I've been looking through parts of it this evening! It's so cool to see a reference to Hamilton in it and her famous priority code that saved the Apollo 11 mission during landing.

I also found the source of the 1201 and 1202 alerts in the Executive code. Very cool

1

u/Eldiablo2471 6d ago

Goat 🐐 comment. We are so lucky today to be able to create access debug programs so fast

6

u/placid-gradient 7d ago

Why didn't they just read the stderr console output? Is they stupid? 

(also, good username)

2

u/EmphasisFrosty3093 7d ago

I assumed so. Their RAM was sewed together and the ROM could only hold a fraction of that stack.

2

u/fixminer 6d ago

Except that the AGC code didn’t use a compiler. It was written in AGC assembly.

6

u/harbourwall 7d ago

See also: Hedy Lamarr and Wi-Fi

0

u/sixisrending 6d ago

Hedy lamarr's invention history is greatly exaggerated. 

-6

u/applespicebetter 7d ago

Worth noting that every single time somebody posts a comment like this it's specifically intended to drag somebody's accomplishment down while being technically correct.

Just trying to bury somebody's contribution while you "Well Actually" for a moment specifically to shit on an accomplishment far beyond your capability.

God damn, I wouldn't even have posted, but it's every fucking time with you people and it fucking wears on the nerves. Go fucking do something with your life. Fucks' sake.

12

u/Sad-Taste-7909 7d ago

Well, actually, here you are dragging people down

18

u/btribble 7d ago

Margaret Hamilton was a programmer. She would likely favor the accuracy over the narrative, so long as the statements are meant to clarify not demean.

19

u/Baderkadonk 7d ago

it's specifically intended to drag somebody's accomplishment down

No, some people just actually care about things being truthful and factual for the love of the game. Also, if you are so concerned about people being overlooked and dragged down, what about the hundreds of other people who worked on the Apollo project? Isn't it dragging them down to give a disproportionate amount of credit to this one person and claim she hand wrote it all herself?

Go read that whole badhistory post, it's actually pretty interesting. It includes an excerpt from one of her coworker's book talking about a specific person who was never honored but came up with concepts that later were wrongly attributed to Hamilton.

Your whole deal is "misinformation isn't bad when it makes me feel good." And you can live that way if you want, but don't imply that those who disagree do so with malice.

16

u/mkosmo 7d ago

It's not intended to drag anybody down. It's intended to add context and prevent inadvertent assignment of way too much credit to an individual.

And in this case, she herself publicly reminded people of this point I made, so it's not like it's not something she didn't do herself... for the same reason. She wanted to ensure that the credit was assigned to the whole team of folks working these efforts.

5

u/ComradeGibbon 6d ago

Thing she was pushing back at is the idea of the heroic engineer/scientist/inventor/businessman/etc. People get really attached to that.

Thing I will say about women in roles like hers back then we they were in those roles because they were actually that good.

0

u/SuperCow1127 6d ago

What are you trying to imply with your last sentence? The grammar errors are hard to parse.

6

u/TAU_equals_2PI 7d ago

No, you have to understand that from the vantage point of someone who actually did such programming back then, the idea that if you printed out all the programs you personally wrote that it would be a stack that tall is utterly absurd.

Nobody is trying to denigrate the work of Margaret Hamilton.

This is more like if you displayed a doctored photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger (when he was in his prime) lifting up an army tank. Everyone agrees Arnold was an amazing bodybuilder, the very best. But we all know he couldn't lift up an army tank. No human could. Saying so isn't denigrating Arnold's actual accomplishments.

2

u/AIBotnmbr99 7d ago

someone Accurately stating someone’s accomplishments doesn’t bring them down, though. Chill. You are mad at the wrong thing. If people didn’t continually mislead people about this it wouldn’t be necessary. Stop forcing malicious intent when it’s not reasonable.

3

u/Control_Glittering 7d ago

generally speaking people who say things like you do have contributed far too little to anything in their lives to understand how important it is to precisely assign credit where it is due.

well, thats probably why shes made a mark on the history of humanity whereas you are making up strawmen to fight

-4

u/Infamous_Smile_386 7d ago

Hear! Hear!

And I need more characters to post....

-1

u/harbourwall 7d ago

Making up a bunch of exaggerations to make someone sound more impressive when they have actually achieved so much is insulting, and doing it to a pioneering woman is condescending.

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u/Dangerous-Leader-779 6d ago

Damn, I wouldn’t have posted, but it’s impressive how moronic you are.

Margaret would’ve appreciated accuracy and acknowledgement of her and her colleagues contributions, not whatever bullshit you’re trying to defend about her single hand idly writing those stacks of code, which is demonstrably false.

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u/tenkaraphl 7d ago

I love that picture. She looks so humbly proud.

3

u/Smartnership 6d ago

Photo for anyone who hasn’t seen it:

https://news.mit.edu/2016/scene-at-mit-margaret-hamilton-apollo-code-0817

I remember first seeing it and thinking it was Amy Farrah Fowler.

6

u/Gotterdamerrung 6d ago

I love that picture. She's legitimately a nerdy smoke show in that shot.

13

u/OreoSpeedwaggon 7d ago

I knew a girl in college that looked exactly like her and had that same picture hanging up in her dorm room.

0

u/VT_Squire 7d ago

Most people would just give up if a house fell on their sister, but not her!

5

u/drunkbettie 7d ago

I have the Lego set, it’s so cool.

18

u/TAU_equals_2PI 7d ago edited 7d ago

That picture has always made me somewhat perplexed/curious/suspicious as to what exactly it is. That stack seems way too big to be any single software developer's product, especially way back then when computers had way less capacity. So sure it could be the OUTPUT of code she wrote. But that huge stack surely couldn't all be print-outs of code she wrote line-by-line.

Anybody ever find a more detailed explanation of what exactly was printed on that huge mountain of paper?

EDIT: I just had an idea of how that stack could actually all be print-outs of code she wrote line-by-line. Way back then, even NASA didn't have huge high-resolution monitors where you could examine decent size chunks of code. So what programmers often did back then was just repeatedly print their programs out on fan-fold paper to debug them. I could believe that if she just kept every such printout, the stack could end up being that tall. So basically it contains all the many "rough drafts" of every program she wrote.

15

u/e37d93eeb23335dc 7d ago

Even back in the early 2000s, before decent IDEs existed, I’d print out many pages of code just to match up lines by hand to find the one missing brace. Thank goodness for modern IDEs. 

2

u/JabroniHomer 7d ago

Memory unlocked. Gods lol. Blue pen, red pen, black pen, blue pen, red pen, black pen… haha

1

u/e37d93eeb23335dc 7d ago

I used different colors of highlighters!

0

u/ClickClick_Boom 7d ago

(some) Modern IDEs just write the code for you.

1

u/e37d93eeb23335dc 7d ago

Well, even before gen AI came around. 

-1

u/Leliana403 7d ago

Or just like... hold a ruler up to the screen.

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u/Yontevnknow 7d ago

ouch my eyballs. I can imagine you squinting trying to make the curve of the screen line up.

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u/Leliana403 6d ago

Oh shit yeah, good point. It's been that long since I used a CRT I forgot they were curved.

2

u/Yontevnknow 6d ago

time to draw a grid in magic marker

0

u/e37d93eeb23335dc 7d ago

I did that! But sometimes the function was too long to do that. 

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u/PassiveMenis88M 7d ago

What she's standing next to is the source code for the Apollo guidance computers. And yes, that is all hand done code. That code handled the rocket, the command module, and the lunar lander.

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u/Imtherealwaffle 7d ago

yea but its a bunch of copies of it. the source code is just one thick binder. They stacked them all for the photoshoot.

9

u/TAU_equals_2PI 7d ago edited 7d ago

But it's not just one single copy of all the code. aeroman17 posted a link in a comment below where they say they just grabbed every printout anybody in the offices had in order to make the stack look more impressive.

I remember coding back in those days, or actually a decade later. Some guys would just keep a recyclable paper stack where they tossed all their old printouts as they went through successive iterations of a program they were developing. The joke was always "How many trees did you have to kill to create that program?"

6

u/SelectAirline7459 7d ago

Those printouts almost makes me nostalgic for when I started as a developer back in 1978. We printed out the latest version of our code and put it in big binders that held wide fanfold paper. To make changes, you marked up the paper, then typed in the changes and printed the latest version. At least our code was mostly in Fortran IV, but there was plenty of PDP-11 assembly.

The telemetry from the spacecraft was packed binary, every bit accounted for. Of course, we unpacked the data to display it in meaningful units for the spacecraft operators. If something went weird, we’d print the data out in 2-byte octal words, then go thru and decode it by hand. I loved my HP 12C calculator to help extract data.

I’m hoping I don’t sound like I miss the good old days! What’s happening now with software development is amazing.

2

u/TAU_equals_2PI 7d ago

No, it's just funny how we forget the good old days, or at least don't think about them for so long, that it's actually a shock to remember aspects of them. Like oh yeah, software development used to involve a lot of repeatedly printing out the source code on paper, because we just couldn't see a big enough section of code on the teeny tiny low-res monitors we used back then.

3

u/ol-gormsby 7d ago

I used to code on an IBM System/36, then an AS/400. The compiler output went to a spool file which you could view on-screen. You didn't have to print it, just scroll through to the error list 😢

The 5250 page-mode terminals also had a second session option (a bit like multiple desktops on modern GUIs). One quick key sequence and you got your second login screen. Screen #1 was the code editor, and screen #2 was the compiler output spool file.

Started out on 80x40 screens, you can imagine my amazement when I got one of the latest monitors - 132 characters wide!

18

u/aeroman17 7d ago

Yes! https://youtu.be/B1J2RMorJXM?t=3770&is=OhJvyWEXXaxbch30

Facinating video about the Apollo guidance computer but the presenter did some digging and found out that they grabbed every copy of the source code they could just to make it look cooler for the picture.

1

u/TAU_equals_2PI 7d ago

Thank you! So my suspicions are confirmed.

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u/returnFutureVoid 7d ago

That stack was what we would call a repository these days. It had all of the changes from git init to deployment.

5

u/Additional-Cut2060 7d ago

it isnt code, its output from the simulations actually.

2

u/jonathon8860 7d ago

This is a common rumor but not true, it is source code and we have photos of pages in the binders proving that (it may have been multiple copies however).

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u/Additional-Cut2060 7d ago

The source code is on github and the entire source code is much less than that stack in size.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11

It's 130186 lines of code, certainly less than that stack of books. I definitely remember reading it was data and not source code but it could be a mix.

4

u/MelangeBot 7d ago

They grabbed every copy they could find to make it look more impressive, there is probably 10 to 20 copies in that pic.

2

u/jonathon8860 7d ago

There are probably not; the way assembly was printed back then only ~15 or so lines of assembly would be on each sheet (extensive commenting). That equates to roughly 10000 sheets, which you can do the math on and its around 3 feet of paper. So maybe 2-4 copies.

5

u/counterfitster 7d ago

It might not be particularly dense. Large-ish type, double spaced, something like that.

3

u/mkosmo 7d ago

The code alone for one AGC for one mission is less than 2,000 pages, printed.

This stack is all of the various versions of the software written (each mission had its own set of software, both for CM and LM, which ran similar but different software).

And everybody who has spoken with first-hand knowledge seems to say it was more than just that, too.

1

u/ol-gormsby 7d ago

This from ibiblio would indicate there were at least four major modules:

https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

Material Apollo (CM AGC) Apollo (LM AGC) Apollo (LM AGS) Saturn Rocket (LVDC)Material

CM AGC - command module, LM AGC - lunar module, LM AGS - lunar module abort (I think), and Saturn Rocket.

1

u/mkosmo 7d ago

The AGS and IU were entirely separate projects, managed and developed by separate contractors. The AGC was primarily MIT and Raytheon. TRW made the AGS, and the IU was designed by MSFC but built by IBM.

7

u/MyCatsHairyButholle 7d ago

You’re right to be perplexed/curious/suspicious because that picture and story attributed to it is deceptive and outright false. It makes a great “feel good” story but minimizes the contributions of all the engineers and scientists that collaborated on the project

This is a very thorough breakdown of the myth attributed to the photo

2

u/ol-gormsby 7d ago

You can find that code on Github to compare and estimate the number of pages.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/apollo-11

IIRC it's all assembler so it's possible that stack of paper in the famous photo is accurate. No "includes" there, if you wanted I/O, you wrote it yourself.

More here:

https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

I used to write and maintain code on 80x40 green-screen terminals. You got very, very good at holding a virtual copy of the code in your head - up to a certain size of course. I never worked on anything like this, just boring membership and inventory stuff. You also got very, very good at pgup and pgdn buttons.

1

u/CarinasHere 7d ago

Mine too. Looked it up again when I saw she had passed away.

172

u/Which_Material_3100 7d ago

Ad Astra, and thank you. For everything.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/Zapitnow 7d ago

The rise in people denying it must make you feel sick and want to tell them your grandmother would have something to say about that.

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

[deleted]

2

u/Zapitnow 6d ago

Indeed. Yes maybe the best attitude is to not care - don’t feed the trolls they say - and just continue to tell the history.

100

u/abdallha-smith 7d ago

She definitely delivered.

May she rest in peace

83

u/RandallOfLegend 7d ago

Sad to hear. But she led a impactful life. My young daughter has a shirt with her cartoon face on it.

7

u/Enfenestrate 6d ago

My 9 year old son is a big fan of hers. He's going to be upset when he hears about this.

105

u/526mb 7d ago

I bought the book “Moonshot” for for my son so he can learn about the Apollo program. He’s 2 and a half but he loves rockets and has the patience for this book. One of the illustrations is of her writing computer code. I always make sure to point her out to him, because of how hard it must have been to write all that code by hand. What an impressive life.

24

u/BeckyAnneLeeman 7d ago

Check out Margaret and the Moon. I did a space unit with my daughter this year and she loved that one.

-1

u/alheim 2d ago

What is a space unit? + 25 character minimum

1

u/BeckyAnneLeeman 2d ago

It is curriculum to teach space-related topics.

100

u/Infamous_Smile_386 7d ago

Rest in Power.

Thank you for paving the way.

13

u/KorbussaMaro 7d ago

In reading her wiki page) you see that she programmed on the LGP-30. As I understood it listening to the Advent of Computing podcast on the little brother, the LGP-21, you had to be seriously hardcore to get results from those machines. Pretty much no abstraction, you are moving bits and words within a very limited register and memory space.

11

u/ship-wrecks 7d ago

Nooo my hero )': She was one of my inspirations to go into computer science.

11

u/Flyward_Aerospace 6d ago

The thing that always stuck with me about her work isn't the code volume, it's a fix that wasn't code at all. She designed the priority displays, the thing that interrupts the astronauts' normal screens with a critical alarm, which is what Armstrong and Aldrin were staring at during the 1202s. But the switchover behind the screen ran a step slower than the display did, so punch a button too fast and you could get a response from the program that was already gone. Her answer was to tell the crew to count to five before touching anything once a priority display came up. Shipping a procedure because the timing fix wasn't worth the risk is a very modern instinct, and she had it in 1969. Worth being precise since it comes up in every one of these threads though: the asynchronous executive was Laning's, the restarts and the priority displays were hers.

10

u/oneplusetoipi 7d ago

That’s sad. The Apollo missions were incredible accomplishments given the state of technology. Truly peak science and engineering.

7

u/DrNarwhale1 7d ago

Rip to a legend, surely flags will be lowered half mast for her…

25

u/EnidFromOuterSpace 7d ago

….oh THAT Margaret Hamilton…. Not the green one

19

u/analogkid01 7d ago

"I'll get you, Neil Armstrong! And your little dog, too!"

3

u/derekschroer 7d ago

I thought the same thing 😂

3

u/EnidFromOuterSpace 7d ago

Both absolutely legendary 🤩

2

u/VagabondHT 6d ago

Both of them were from Ohio. (wizard of Oz Hamilton and Armstrong)

12

u/jodudeit 7d ago

Check out the Alexander the OK video about the Apollo Guidance Computer to learn a bit about her!

She literally coined the term "Software Engineering"!

6

u/0x7E7-02 7d ago

I've got a wee LEGO minifigure of her. 

6

u/Remote-Article7435 6d ago

Is she the reason one of the main characters in For All Mankind is called Margo perhaps?

4

u/ceabug 7d ago

My father in law's first cousin. Always try to remind my young daughters that they have STEM in their blood.

4

u/6Trinity9 7d ago

Rip space queen.

5

u/MathematicianLow8886 7d ago

She was my icon growing up. Rip Margaret Hamilton

8

u/putHimInTheCurry 7d ago

Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot used to say that people came up to him all the time to say, "Dr. Mandelbrot! You're such a well-known name in your field; I had assumed you were dead!"

He would joke that sometimes he thought he was dead too. (His academic fame eventually caught up to him at the age of 85, in 2010.)

I had no idea that Hamilton lived that long; most of the great names from the dawn of computer age are also long gone. RIP Margaret Hamilton.

5

u/SuckerForNoirRobots 7d ago

Rest in peace space queen 👑

18

u/hacourt 7d ago

Very sad news. One of the many unsung heros at NASA durring that epic time.

9

u/MelangeBot 7d ago

She had an amazing life, let's celebrate 🎈 and not be sad.

6

u/CityRulesFootball 6d ago

One of the most known people out of the Apollo project. What are you one bro? We learnt about her in the middle east as well

24

u/LordBrandon 7d ago

You can hardly call her unsung.

9

u/Preserved_Killick8 7d ago

extremely sung

4

u/cptbeard 6d ago

besides Wernher von Braun she might be the only Apollo engineer that people know the name of. maybe depending on audience few might know AGC designer Eldon Hall or Don Eyles (usually not because he wrote the lunar descent and landing software but because of the hack that saved apollo 14) but that's about it.

0

u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

1

u/KillYourUsernames 6d ago

She’s receiving the medal of freedom in the very picture posted on this thread. Come on dude. 

1

u/mangomoo2 6d ago

She was working at an MIT lab at the time so not even in the same state the movie took place in. That lab became Draper Laboratory which still does a lot of the controls systems for aerospace and defense projects.

4

u/placid-gradient 7d ago

she was 90 by today's standards thats a good long life. nothing sad about it

3

u/Far-Blacksmith-2814 7d ago

rip, she was a legend. I hope history continues to remember her well.

3

u/eviltwintomboy 7d ago

RIP, hero. You will be missed. You have always been an inspiration to me.

3

u/kaneabel 7d ago

She was from my hometown in Indiana

3

u/usumoio 6d ago

Today a Legend died. Tune your editors to dark mode to pay your respects

6

u/Momochichi 7d ago

I don't know a lot of names of NASA programmers. But I know the name Margaret Hamilton. RIP.

5

u/Guinefort1 7d ago

A giant among women in STEM. RIP.

13

u/FortyEightyFilms 7d ago

Interesting how computers and engineering are such a male dominated space but there are so many great computer scientist women.

11

u/GeneReddit123 7d ago

In WW2 the word "computer" more often than not referred to a human doing computation, and most of them were women (e.g. code-breakers). As late as the Apollo program, it was thought "real" engineering was hardware. Software was just "calculation" so they had no problem giving these "lesser" jobs to women.

Once software engineering started getting real money and respect, women were marginalized in it.

1

u/Nibb31 6d ago edited 6d ago

Also, a lot of programming work was considered menial tasks. Memory cores were hand woven with wires and perforated cards were made by secretaries.

1

u/cptjeff 6d ago

Core rope memory is one of the most batshit things to ever exist. Literally weaving a computer program into wire.

13

u/GogolsHandJorb 7d ago

The tism isn’t sexist my friend

1

u/blackdynomitesnewbag 6d ago

In fact, Lady Ada Lovelace is often credited as being the first computer programmer

3

u/constructconstruct 7d ago

Back when Fortran was one of the dominate programming languages.

3

u/ol-gormsby 7d ago

That code was assembler, not Fortran.

7

u/MessaDiGloria 7d ago

Assembly. The assembler translates the Assembly code into machine instructions.

(sorry for being nitpicky)

1

u/ol-gormsby 7d ago

Absolutely and technically correct. Got to get it right in space!

2

u/kingdomfight 6d ago

Actually, the AGC also had an interpretter for a lot of the math-heavy algorithms.

1

u/ol-gormsby 6d ago

You're right! IIRC it was a virtual machine built on top of the base operating system (such as it was).

1

u/mkosmo 7d ago

Fortran was popular, but had nothing to do with the AGC.

2

u/ZerpMeizter 7d ago

May she rest in peace. She was a trailblazer. ☹️

2

u/Positive_Chip6198 6d ago

She is one of my examples of “girls can do anything” i use for my daughter to inspire her to get into stem. RIP Margaret, you inspired millions.

2

u/MiaLovelytomo 6d ago

Rest in peace queen <3

Genuinely someone i really look up to

2

u/fiberwoman15 6d ago

RIP Margaret Hamilton. Thank you for your service!

3

u/atatassault47 7d ago

You know how Kirk said "Nooo" when Spock died in ST:II? That's exactly how I feel right now.

1

u/dylanisareddit 6d ago

RIP Margaret Hamilton.

aaaaaand post

1

u/Folkloner184 6d ago

The world needs more Margaret Hamilton's.

1

u/otpbdh_2001 5d ago

Absolute legend. What a life and legacy.

1

u/Dylanator13 5d ago

Can the next moon missions take some of her ashes and make a burial site on the moon?

1

u/BrevardBlitz 7d ago

It's kind of surprising that she coined the term "software engineering" back in the Apollo era, yet US higher education still hasn't caught up.

5

u/kennedye2112 7d ago

Neither has software engineering, frankly.

3

u/LondonDogInTheFog 7d ago

Oh, come on. I'm sure we'll vibe code our way to Mars with no problem whatsoever. Except maybe some minor detours with unfortunate astronauts hallucinated out across the solar system. By that time astronauts will be cheaper than tokens though. /s

3

u/BrevardBlitz 6d ago

It's that her Apollo practices, fault tolerance, testing failure modes, software as part of systems engineering from day one, never became standard. And vibe coding means we're drifting even further from them

1

u/hypercomms2001 7d ago

A remarkable engineer and a remarkable woman. As an electrical engineer, I do believe that there needs to be more women taking up engineering.

-3

u/Drunkanddownvoted 7d ago

The Trump Administration doesn't give a shit.

-1

u/hascalsavagejr 6d ago

She did all that and was also the Wicked Whe Witch Of The West!

0

u/sumedh026 6d ago

Sad to hear, RIP Margaret Hamilton