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Margaret Hamilton’s Contributions:
Presentation Script
On July 20, 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar module was preparing to land when error code 1202 began to flash! One of the radars was feeding unnecessary data into the system causing the computer to overload and reboot.
Thankfully, the Apollo Guidance Computer system was designed to be asynchronous. Rather than abourt, Margaret’s “Forget it” software alerted Buzz and Neil to cancel the radar function and continued its more important mission to land on the moon. 650 Million people witnessed one of the greatest achievements in human history.
Margaret Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana where she studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Michigan and Earlham College. She planned to pursue graduate work in mathematics, but while her husband was in grad school she took a temporary position at MIT where she developed weather prediction software.
Hamilton and her team were critical in the success of the Apollo mission because of their remarkably advanced software. The software interrupted the astronaut’s display notifying them of the computer overload and provided them with emergency-related options to choose from.
The interface allowed the astronauts to communicate with the computer using program codes. Hamilton designed a man in the loop concept that allowed software to communicate asynchronously in real-time with the astronauts. This is a revolution in Human-Computer Interaction. With this new interface the astronauts, system control, hardware, and software became a system-wide solution that worked together.
When Margaret Hamilton was hired at NASA, she was given an instruction manual of the computer systems and was told to make it all work together. Knowing she would need to program the computers to function in unique life saving ways, she coined the term “software engineer”.
After the success of Apollo 11, and decades of missions after it, Margaret incorporated Hamilton Technologies. Over many years she perfected her greatest contribution to human computer interactions: Universal System Language. USL is made possible by her mathematical automation called 001 Tool Suite. USL is based on her philosophy of Development Before The Fact. Rather than fixing problems as they come up, Margaret’s philosophy is to prevent problems from ever happening.
Margaret’s USL innovations have been utilized by some of the world’s largest companies like AT&T, IBM and many others. Here’s an example of how Margaret’s innovations inspired a system of systems to help you get to where they are going. Imagine you are self-driving a Tesla. The battery is low, so you use the car’s built in Ai to find a local charging station. Along the way, your car recognizes other cars and the rules of the road, but when you get to the charging station, you still have to get out of the car to plug it in, once the battery recognizes the charge it tells you how long you need to wait. Soon you are back on the road and heading to your destination. This is the language of a universal system of systems working together.
Margaret is an inspiration to millions of women around the world and even entered the mainstream when Lego released its women of NASA set. Because of her software development on the Apollo missions, Margaret was given the highest honor to a civilian, the Medal of Freedom award.
“Margaret’s love of exploration and innovation are the source code of the American spirit and her genius has inspired generations to reach for the stars.”