My Hero, Mrs. Margaret Hamilton
I am sure many of you have seen the classic picture from 1969 of Margaret Hamilton next to the code she and her team wrote, by hand, for the Flight Control System on the Apollo missions. Over the weekend I was reflecting on Hamilton and other dev pioneers and was struck by some amazing revelations that really put our work in perspective. Here are some things to think about:
Mrs. Hamilton had just about the same number of Devs as my current team.
They wrote all their low level code by hand and transferred them to punch cards.
There were none of our modern tools to inspect code, simulate runs, or automate tests.
They had, by todays standards, almost no hardware to run their programs on (72 kilobytes of RAM memory).
Her rigorous approach was so successful that no software bugs were ever known to have occurred during any crewed Apollo missions.
Her team was writing this code as hardware was being designed and developed.
Mrs. Hamilton and her team only had very high level requirement and had to figure out HOW to make it work and what support software was needed to insure the success of the mission and the safety of all involved.
There was no one to throw the problem over the wall too. Mistakes meant that the Mission would fail and people would die. The Mission, the big picture, is what mattered. In the end if the Mission failed it didn't mater if the software was built as requested, it still failed.
Mrs. Hamilton delivered her first production release (Apollo 1) in only two years.
It is easy to view Mrs. Hamilton's work as ancient history but she is still alive, and software development is still cutting edge work that we are all involved in.
