Recognising Outstanding Women In Tech
March 8th 2018. 101 years to the day when women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia and a date that is now recognised as International Women’s Day.
Working in the tech sector I am acutely aware of the gender disparity in our industry and I thought I’d focus this blog post on outstanding women in tech. One in particular stands out for me and that’s Margaret Hamilton, who was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory during the time of the first manned mission to the moon in 1969.
Please share your own suggestions for outstanding women in tech in the Comments box below.
Under Hamilton’s lead, MIT developed flight software for Apollo 11 in 1969. As space geeks (like me) will tell you the mission was almost aborted when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were just minutes from the Moon’s surface. A number of computer alarms went off, the result of the computer being overloaded due to an incorrectly phased power supply – yes, the multi-billion dollar mission was nearly aborted due to what was essentially a faulty plug!
With just three minutes to go until landing, the guidance computer on board did not have enough time to complete all its necessary tasks in order to land. Software developed by Hamilton’s MIT team recognised that the computer was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be.
In Hamilton’s own words:
“It [the software] 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 ... 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.”
Letter from Margaret H. Hamilton, Director of Apollo Flight Computer Programming MIT Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, titled "Computer Got Loaded", published in Datamation March 1, 1971
Margaret Hamilton’s achievements were recognised in 2016 when she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.
If you’d like to know more then I recommend this excellent piece in Wired, in which Hamilton also discusses the novelty of being a working mother in a male-dominated tech environment (an all-too relevant story in 2018):
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/