Computer History Museum Publishes Memories of the Programmer for NASA’s Moon Missions

This week Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum posted a PDF transcript (and video excerpts) from an interview with 81-year-old Margaret Hamilton, the programmer/systems designer who in the 1960s became director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which developed the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. Prior to that Hamilton had worked on software to detect an airplane’s radar signature, but thought, "You know, ‘I guess I should delay graduate school again because I’d like to work on this program that puts all these men on the Moon….’" "There was always one thing that stood out in my mind, being in the onboard flight software, was that it was ‘man rated,’ meaning if it didn’t work a person’s life was at stake if not over. That was always uppermost in my mind and probably many others as well." Interestingly, Hamilton had originally received two job offers from the Apollo Space Program, and had told them to flip a coin to settle it. ("The other job had to do with support systems. It was software, but it wasn’t the onboard flight software.") But what’s fascinating is the interview’s glimpses at some of the earliest days of the programming profession:
There was all these engineers, okay? Hardware engineers, aeronautical engineers and all this, a lot of them out of MIT… But the whole idea of software and programming…? Dick Batten, Dr. Batten, when they told him that they were going to be responsible for the software…he went home to his wife and said he was going to be in charge of software and he thought it was some soft clothing… Hamilton also remembers in college taking a summer job as a student actuary at Travelers Insurance in the mid-1950s, and "all of a sudden one day word was going around Travelers that there were these new things out there called computers that were going to take away all of their jobs… Pretty soon they wouldn’t have jobs. And so everybody was talking about it. They were scared they wouldn’t have a way to make a living. "But, of course, it ended up being more jobs were created with the computers than there were…." Hamilton’s story about Apollo 8 is amazing…