Margaret Hamilton

 By L R 

You are on part of Apollo 11, the Eagle. You flip a lever telling the ship to land. Suddenly, an emergency warning turns on! red lights are flashing and there is beeping all around you. What happens next? 

Margret Hamilton was born August 17, 1936, so right now she is 87. She is still alive. She has one daughter: Laura Hamilton. She has had two husbands(separately): James Cox Hamilton and Dan Lickly. 

She went to two colleges: University of Michigan and Earlham College (BA). 

 

When Margret worked for the SAGE Project, she said "What they used to do when you came into this organization as a beginner, was to assign you this program which nobody was able to ever figure out or get to run. When I was the beginner they gave it to me as well. And what had happened was it was tricky programming, and the person who wrote it took delight in the fact that all of his comments were in Greek and Latin. So I was assigned this program and I actually got it to work. It even printed out its answers in Latin and Greek. I was the first one to get it to work.”  

Margret became a software engineer, which is a job and title that she made up. Software engineers build computer programs. 

Margret got one award- the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Three minutes before the lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, several computer alarms were triggered. The system was designed to support seven simultaneous programs running. The eighth had been triggered. There were unexpected error codes, "never supposed to happen displays", and priority alarm displays. Margret Hamilton had prepared for just this situation years before. 

“The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, 'I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks'; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ... If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.” -Margret Hamilton 

Margret asked the ship to ignore all tasks but landing. She also designed software for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). Margret’s daughter, Lauren, foretold one of the worst mistakes. While playing in Hamilton’s office when she was 4 years old, Lauren entered the code for a prelaunch program P01 while the simulator was in midflight, triggering a major error. In response, Margret suggested a line of code that would prevent that event, but it was informed by NASA that no astronaut would make such a mistake. During apollo 8, Jim Lovell accidentally wiped out the command and service module’s navigation data, creating the same situation that Lauren had made. 

I think Margaret Hamilton is amazing because she did things that no man or woman has ever done before, and she was one of the main creators of the revolution of technology.  She also created an entirely new job, saved people's lives, and created an insane amount of code. 

 

 

 

Sources: 

• Wikipedia 

• Apollo To The Moon: By Teasel Muir-Harmony 

• Margret And The Moon: By Dean Robbins