9 ms·

Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

309 points by bootload 10y ago

wallace_f 10y ago
I would have guessed Grace Hopper already given every applicable award possible for her contributions by now. Late is better than never though. I guess great scientists going under-appreciated is nothing new, however.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Bout time! They both deserve it as their contributions definitelt impacted America in huge ways. :)
tanderson92 10y ago
It's hard to look at the list of Medal of Freedom awardees and conclude this list is strictly meritocratic (these two individuals are exceptions who absolutely deserve it). There were people nominated, e.g. Jack Bogle, who have made a much more significant impact on Americans' lives than people like Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, and Frank Gehry. Even Lorne Michaels won one! But the guy who gave up potentially billions of dollars to help the average American investor get a fair shake hasn't had enough of an impact...
- colmvp 10y ago
  Obama said: "From scientists, philanthropists, and public servants to activists, athletes, and artists, these 21 individuals have helped push America forward, inspiring millions of people around the world along the way." I'm glad that the award values contributions from creatives whose works and organizations have influenced entire industries and the masses.
  - Waterluvian 10y ago
    Artists are basically the support class of society. They don't producr anything directly, but the producers all benefit from, and kind of need them.
    - ternaryoperator 10y ago
      Jasper Johns once expressed this sentiment this way: "Artists are the elite of the servant class."
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    >I'm glad that the award values contributions from creatives whose works and organizations have influenced entire industries and the masses. I don't disagree with that sentiment, but I do disagree that the award sold to the public as the highest public honor a civilian can receive has been awarded disproportionately to artists, politicians and athletes. There are more musicians alone who have received the award than all scientists combined. More movie stars than human rights activists, more athletes than any of: philanthropists, doctors, or environmentalists. The award is also awarded not without political consideration. Aside from very obvious examples of those who should have received it, some won't for purely political reasons. Journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman deserve the award, as two examples, but their work is by its nature critical of both parties who have been in power, and so neither one would award it to them.
sotojuan 10y ago
I've noticed that Grace Hopper and sometimes Ada Lovelace are the only women in computing people ever talk about. I'm glad I got to know about Margaret Hamilton, but this is the first time I've heard of her at all. There's so many awards, events, and groups named after Hopper or Lovelace that you'd think they're the only two women in computing :/
- bandrami 10y ago
  Radia Perlman deserves more credit than she gets. She invented the Spanning Tree Protocol at DEC. Also Elizabeth Rather, co-inventor of the Forth language.
  - todd8 10y ago
    Barbara Liskov: -- ACM Turing Award, "For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing" -- IEEE John von Neumann Award, “For fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems.”
  - gmartres 10y ago
    Radia Perlman also wrote a great (and fun!) book on networking: https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Internetworking-Protocols/dp/0201634481/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479676325&sr=8-1&keywords=radia+perlman https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Int...
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It actually ticked me off when I found out about her that she and her team did so much with basically no recognition. Here's two nice resources on her. One has a picture of her standing next to the code they did in assembly on hand-made memory that worked the first time in worst environment imaginable. Last is the site with her tool she built to try to eliminate all software errors at spec level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/ http://htius.com/ http://htius.com/
robotresearcher 10y ago
Hamilton had possibly the most exciting and demanding job ever in computer science and engineering. It must have been so much fun. About as full stack as it gets. Bletchley Park and the Manhattan project were great computing projects too, but Apollo is my favorite since they had such a tiny mass and power budget, real time constraints and the runtime consequences were so personal. Damn that was a great project. Hopper was a giant of course. But Hamilton is less well known and I've been a fan since my youth.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I actually get choked up watching the appropriate episode of "Moon Machines", the one that covers the MIT team. That project was an 0xCF. But it worked. I was 9 when the moon lander landed, but I was still old enough to feel the Sputnik emphasis in tech. I grew up with that program. It was the era of EE programs with 50% washout rates. We would go to Huntsville, Houston or Cape Kennedy on vacation. It was just like that then. I don't know how anybody could have survived the first real test of a system like that being on national TV. That's the stuff of nervous breakdowns. Ad then by '74 we killed it because nobody knew any economics back then. Or maybe because they did. I want a Mad Men style show about the Apollo program. Oh, why not? Why not?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Ad then by '74 we killed it because nobody knew any economics back then. Or maybe because they did. Probably the latter. By the time Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, von Braun and friends were sketching plans for a Mars mission, and pushing for development of nuclear propulsion. According to Wikipedia[0], US Congress saw that and decided to kill the space race, out of fear it will expand beyond the Moon, and consume resources needed elsewhere (like for the arms race). [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#In_the_space_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#In_the_space_program
    - vanderZwan 10y ago
      > (like for the arms race) Well, that turned out to be more of a perceived than actual need.
chrisseaton 10y ago
I was at a conference recently when someone said that Hamilton invented multi threading. Is that true? Does anyone know if that's what the prioritisation of critical systems this article talks about was?
- abecedarius 10y ago
  I don't know, but threads were at least in Dijkstra's 60s paper on the THE multiprogramming system, and interrupts and timesharing go back further.
- OliverJones 10y ago
  Whether or not Ms. Hamilton invented multithreading, she definitely figured out how to handle thread priorities well enough to get the lander on the moon. There's a great photo on her wikipedia entry showing her standing by her source code pile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I think she co-invented it. Several people independently invented some important stuff around the same time. Bob Barton in late 50's for all kinds of things, Hamilton in Apollo, and Dijkstra. They were figuring it out around the same time. Hamilton outdid Dijkstra by doing that, asynchronous execution, real-time, fault detection, recovery system, and putting it into production.
cfhff3 10y ago
> Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom > Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom
markrages 10y ago
The last Code Less Code is appropriate here: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Back when real programmers where women. I don't think it is nostalgia to say that we need more programmers like these women. They make an excellent case for a more diverse technology workforce.
- venomsnake 10y ago
  We will take anyone as long as their IQ and capabilities are off the scale (as the two ladies in question) probably won't result in the kind of diversity that the diversity people would appreciate. They (diversity advocates) have been fighting against the SV meritocracy in the last couple of years.
  - dkarapetyan 10y ago
    IQ isn't an inherent or even a constant quality. It is a function of many factors. I agree that Hamilton and Hopper are exceptional and extraordinary but they also worked in exceptional and extraordinary circumstances.
  - lucio 10y ago
    Question: Did u knew that there will be downvotes, but post-it anyway? Or you didn't expect the downvotes? I'm asking because I'm curious about the impact of the "politically correct" culture and its effects.
    - venomsnake 10y ago
      With HN lately it is a coin toss whether a statement will be downvoted or upvoted when talking about diversity. It seems that there is split - depends on who is awake what the reaction will be. Anyway - I never did or intend to do karma whoring. While I tend to rarely post pure troll statements, I do hold views that can be controversial. So when I have something to say I say it.
    - sangnoir 10y ago
      Why should you worry about imaginary Internet points? If your opinion can stand in it's own no matter how controversial, post it. Being civil isn't being "politically incorrect" online or offline. If you say something that might get you punched in the face (literally or metaphorically), don't be surprised when you do get punched in the face.
rdtsc 10y ago
I like this video of Admiral Grace Hopper talking about processing speeds. She illustrates it with her famous "nanoseconds" - pieces of wire that a electricity would travel in a nanosecond. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 What a great role model, for programmers, for women, but also for anyone working in a bureaucratic system. One of her famous quotes is "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission". It became a classic. Python's programming paradigm, for example, which prefers exceptions instead of condition checks is named that. "Computer bugs" phrase also seem to originate with her. Also based on Wikipedia she also was the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- phamilton 10y ago
  > "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" In Swedish this even rhymes. (förlåtelse == forgiveness, tillåtelse == permission). It's a wonderful phrase.
  - joss82 10y ago
    In French too: pardon/permission Very nice indeed.
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago
  > Here's a microsecond. Nine hundred and eighty-four feet. I sometimes think we ought to hang one over every programmer's desk, or around their neck, so they know what they're throwing away when they throw away microseconds. > An admiral wanted to know why it took so damn long to send a message via satellite, and I had to point out that between here and the satellite there were a very large number of nanoseconds. In the video, she's very charismatic and dignified, using humor as appropriate, with a firm focus on the subject.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  I saw that some years ago and made downloadable nanoseconds to print on A4 or 8.5"x11" paper: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html
linker3000 10y ago
My development and test server rack contains: Babbage Turing Wilkes Grace Ada Margaret Not sure how I ended up with male surnames and female first names, but there you go.
- telesilla 10y ago
  "Charles, Alan and Maurice" are not particularly stand-out names in a field of men. You could use "Lovelace, Hopper and Hamilton" to be more balanced, perhaps.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Dijkstra should probably be in there somewhere. He was one of first to structure systems in such a way they could be made correct the first time. Did that in the "THE" system. Plus adding to formal methods.
- mcv 10y ago
  > Not sure how I ended up with male surnames and female first names, but there you go. A common but subtle sort of sexism in our society, I suspect. I noticed a lot of people talking about Hillary and Trump during the election. Whenever I saw that, I tried to counter with Donald and Clinton, but despite that, I fear I wrote about Hillary and Trump more often than about Donald and Clinton.
sabujp 10y ago
Richard Garwin? What an amazing character, went from helping to develop weapons to speaking for non-proliferation.
bandrami 10y ago
Grace Murray Hopper Memorial Park is right next to my apartment complex (we're across I-395 from the Pentagon and apparently she lived here when she retired because they kept calling her back in for consults). Somebody left some flowers there yesterday; not sure if it was because of this or something unrelated, but I thought it was nice.
yaakov34 10y ago
It should be pointed out, just for balance, that Margaret Hamilton was appointed to be the head of MIT's Apollo software team long after the software was frozen; she was still a junior programmer on the project when the command module software was frozen in the 1966-67 timeframe (she became the head of the command module software development after that), and she became the head of the overall software program sometime in 1969 after the software was complete, and key people (such as Dick Battin) moved on to other things. Obviously it is still a major accomplishment to be responsible for release engineering and integration for something this mission critical, but in the media, I often see references to Margaret Hamilton somehow having "written" or "designed" or "lead the team" which made the Apollo software, which is just false.
- gemma 10y ago
  What are you balancing by pointing out that she was a junior programmer who relied on the real key people? Are there incorrect references to her achievements in this comment thread or in the article?
  - yaakov34 10y ago
    Yes, the article states that "Apollo 11 ran her software", which I consider to be a false statement; and many other articles explicitly give her credit for designing or writing the Apollo software. I think writers make that mistake in good faith, since they don't know the timeline of development. And it's not so much that she "relied on the real key people" - she was not a major figure of the development phase of the Apollo software, and certainly did not lead it; Richard Battin and Dan Lickly led the development, and the latter handed the leadership of the software effort over to her as he left the project - but this was after the development itself was over. I am not at all trying to minimize her accomplishments, which included being responsible for the software work, such as release, integration, and debugging during most of the actual flights. However, a lot of people, basically just because of lack of knowledge, give her credit for leading the development or writing of the software as well, which is incorrect.
    - 10y ago

309 points by bootload 10y ago

I would have guessed Grace Hopper already given every applicable award possible for her contributions by now. Late is better than never though. I guess great scientists going under-appreciated is nothing new, however.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Bout time! They both deserve it as their contributions definitelt impacted America in huge ways. :)

tanderson92 10y ago

It's hard to look at the list of Medal of Freedom awardees and conclude this list is strictly meritocratic (these two individuals are exceptions who absolutely deserve it). There were people nominated, e.g. Jack Bogle, who have made a much more significant impact on Americans' lives than people like Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, and Frank Gehry. Even Lorne Michaels won one! But the guy who gave up potentially billions of dollars to help the average American investor get a fair shake hasn't had enough of an impact...

colmvp 10y ago
Obama said: "From scientists, philanthropists, and public servants to activists, athletes, and artists, these 21 individuals have helped push America forward, inspiring millions of people around the world along the way." I'm glad that the award values contributions from creatives whose works and organizations have influenced entire industries and the masses.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  Artists are basically the support class of society. They don't producr anything directly, but the producers all benefit from, and kind of need them.
  - ternaryoperator 10y ago
    Jasper Johns once expressed this sentiment this way: "Artists are the elite of the servant class."
- wallace_f 10y ago
  >I'm glad that the award values contributions from creatives whose works and organizations have influenced entire industries and the masses. I don't disagree with that sentiment, but I do disagree that the award sold to the public as the highest public honor a civilian can receive has been awarded disproportionately to artists, politicians and athletes. There are more musicians alone who have received the award than all scientists combined. More movie stars than human rights activists, more athletes than any of: philanthropists, doctors, or environmentalists. The award is also awarded not without political consideration. Aside from very obvious examples of those who should have received it, some won't for purely political reasons. Journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman deserve the award, as two examples, but their work is by its nature critical of both parties who have been in power, and so neither one would award it to them.

sotojuan 10y ago

I've noticed that Grace Hopper and sometimes Ada Lovelace are the only women in computing people ever talk about. I'm glad I got to know about Margaret Hamilton, but this is the first time I've heard of her at all. There's so many awards, events, and groups named after Hopper or Lovelace that you'd think they're the only two women in computing :/

bandrami 10y ago
Radia Perlman deserves more credit than she gets. She invented the Spanning Tree Protocol at DEC. Also Elizabeth Rather, co-inventor of the Forth language.
- todd8 10y ago
  Barbara Liskov: -- ACM Turing Award, "For contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing" -- IEEE John von Neumann Award, “For fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems.”
- gmartres 10y ago
  Radia Perlman also wrote a great (and fun!) book on networking: https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Internetworking-Protocols/dp/0201634481/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479676325&sr=8-1&keywords=radia+perlman https://www.amazon.com/Interconnections-Bridges-Switches-Int...
nickpsecurity 10y ago
It actually ticked me off when I found out about her that she and her team did so much with basically no recognition. Here's two nice resources on her. One has a picture of her standing next to the code they did in assembly on hand-made memory that worked the first time in worst environment imaginable. Last is the site with her tool she built to try to eliminate all software errors at spec level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/ http://htius.com/ http://htius.com/

robotresearcher 10y ago

Hamilton had possibly the most exciting and demanding job ever in computer science and engineering. It must have been so much fun. About as full stack as it gets. Bletchley Park and the Manhattan project were great computing projects too, but Apollo is my favorite since they had such a tiny mass and power budget, real time constraints and the runtime consequences were so personal. Damn that was a great project. Hopper was a giant of course. But Hamilton is less well known and I've been a fan since my youth.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I actually get choked up watching the appropriate episode of "Moon Machines", the one that covers the MIT team. That project was an 0xCF. But it worked. I was 9 when the moon lander landed, but I was still old enough to feel the Sputnik emphasis in tech. I grew up with that program. It was the era of EE programs with 50% washout rates. We would go to Huntsville, Houston or Cape Kennedy on vacation. It was just like that then. I don't know how anybody could have survived the first real test of a system like that being on national TV. That's the stuff of nervous breakdowns. Ad then by '74 we killed it because nobody knew any economics back then. Or maybe because they did. I want a Mad Men style show about the Apollo program. Oh, why not? Why not?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Ad then by '74 we killed it because nobody knew any economics back then. Or maybe because they did. Probably the latter. By the time Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, von Braun and friends were sketching plans for a Mars mission, and pushing for development of nuclear propulsion. According to Wikipedia[0], US Congress saw that and decided to kill the space race, out of fear it will expand beyond the Moon, and consume resources needed elsewhere (like for the arms race). [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#In_the_space_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#In_the_space_program
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    > (like for the arms race) Well, that turned out to be more of a perceived than actual need.

chrisseaton 10y ago

I was at a conference recently when someone said that Hamilton invented multi threading. Is that true? Does anyone know if that's what the prioritisation of critical systems this article talks about was?

abecedarius 10y ago
I don't know, but threads were at least in Dijkstra's 60s paper on the THE multiprogramming system, and interrupts and timesharing go back further.
OliverJones 10y ago
Whether or not Ms. Hamilton invented multithreading, she definitely figured out how to handle thread priorities well enough to get the lander on the moon. There's a great photo on her wikipedia entry showing her standing by her source code pile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
nickpsecurity 10y ago
I think she co-invented it. Several people independently invented some important stuff around the same time. Bob Barton in late 50's for all kinds of things, Hamilton in Apollo, and Dijkstra. They were figuring it out around the same time. Hamilton outdid Dijkstra by doing that, asynchronous execution, real-time, fault detection, recovery system, and putting it into production.

cfhff3 10y ago

> Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom > Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

markrages 10y ago

The last Code Less Code is appropriate here: http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Back when real programmers where women. I don't think it is nostalgia to say that we need more programmers like these women. They make an excellent case for a more diverse technology workforce.

venomsnake 10y ago
We will take anyone as long as their IQ and capabilities are off the scale (as the two ladies in question) probably won't result in the kind of diversity that the diversity people would appreciate. They (diversity advocates) have been fighting against the SV meritocracy in the last couple of years.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  IQ isn't an inherent or even a constant quality. It is a function of many factors. I agree that Hamilton and Hopper are exceptional and extraordinary but they also worked in exceptional and extraordinary circumstances.
- lucio 10y ago
  Question: Did u knew that there will be downvotes, but post-it anyway? Or you didn't expect the downvotes? I'm asking because I'm curious about the impact of the "politically correct" culture and its effects.
  - venomsnake 10y ago
    With HN lately it is a coin toss whether a statement will be downvoted or upvoted when talking about diversity. It seems that there is split - depends on who is awake what the reaction will be. Anyway - I never did or intend to do karma whoring. While I tend to rarely post pure troll statements, I do hold views that can be controversial. So when I have something to say I say it.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    Why should you worry about imaginary Internet points? If your opinion can stand in it's own no matter how controversial, post it. Being civil isn't being "politically incorrect" online or offline. If you say something that might get you punched in the face (literally or metaphorically), don't be surprised when you do get punched in the face.

rdtsc 10y ago

I like this video of Admiral Grace Hopper talking about processing speeds. She illustrates it with her famous "nanoseconds" - pieces of wire that a electricity would travel in a nanosecond. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8 What a great role model, for programmers, for women, but also for anyone working in a bureaucratic system. One of her famous quotes is "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission". It became a classic. Python's programming paradigm, for example, which prefers exceptions instead of condition checks is named that. "Computer bugs" phrase also seem to originate with her. Also based on Wikipedia she also was the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
phamilton 10y ago
> "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" In Swedish this even rhymes. (förlåtelse == forgiveness, tillåtelse == permission). It's a wonderful phrase.
- joss82 10y ago
  In French too: pardon/permission Very nice indeed.
happy-go-lucky 10y ago
> Here's a microsecond. Nine hundred and eighty-four feet. I sometimes think we ought to hang one over every programmer's desk, or around their neck, so they know what they're throwing away when they throw away microseconds. > An admiral wanted to know why it took so damn long to send a message via satellite, and I had to point out that between here and the satellite there were a very large number of nanoseconds. In the video, she's very charismatic and dignified, using humor as appropriate, with a firm focus on the subject.
jgrahamc 10y ago
I saw that some years ago and made downloadable nanoseconds to print on A4 or 8.5"x11" paper: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html http://blog.jgc.org/2012/10/a-downloadable-nanosecond.html

linker3000 10y ago

My development and test server rack contains: Babbage Turing Wilkes Grace Ada Margaret Not sure how I ended up with male surnames and female first names, but there you go.

telesilla 10y ago
"Charles, Alan and Maurice" are not particularly stand-out names in a field of men. You could use "Lovelace, Hopper and Hamilton" to be more balanced, perhaps.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Dijkstra should probably be in there somewhere. He was one of first to structure systems in such a way they could be made correct the first time. Did that in the "THE" system. Plus adding to formal methods.
mcv 10y ago
> Not sure how I ended up with male surnames and female first names, but there you go. A common but subtle sort of sexism in our society, I suspect. I noticed a lot of people talking about Hillary and Trump during the election. Whenever I saw that, I tried to counter with Donald and Clinton, but despite that, I fear I wrote about Hillary and Trump more often than about Donald and Clinton.

sabujp 10y ago

Richard Garwin? What an amazing character, went from helping to develop weapons to speaking for non-proliferation.

bandrami 10y ago

Grace Murray Hopper Memorial Park is right next to my apartment complex (we're across I-395 from the Pentagon and apparently she lived here when she retired because they kept calling her back in for consults). Somebody left some flowers there yesterday; not sure if it was because of this or something unrelated, but I thought it was nice.

yaakov34 10y ago

It should be pointed out, just for balance, that Margaret Hamilton was appointed to be the head of MIT's Apollo software team long after the software was frozen; she was still a junior programmer on the project when the command module software was frozen in the 1966-67 timeframe (she became the head of the command module software development after that), and she became the head of the overall software program sometime in 1969 after the software was complete, and key people (such as Dick Battin) moved on to other things. Obviously it is still a major accomplishment to be responsible for release engineering and integration for something this mission critical, but in the media, I often see references to Margaret Hamilton somehow having "written" or "designed" or "lead the team" which made the Apollo software, which is just false.

gemma 10y ago
What are you balancing by pointing out that she was a junior programmer who relied on the real key people? Are there incorrect references to her achievements in this comment thread or in the article?
- yaakov34 10y ago
  Yes, the article states that "Apollo 11 ran her software", which I consider to be a false statement; and many other articles explicitly give her credit for designing or writing the Apollo software. I think writers make that mistake in good faith, since they don't know the timeline of development. And it's not so much that she "relied on the real key people" - she was not a major figure of the development phase of the Apollo software, and certainly did not lead it; Richard Battin and Dan Lickly led the development, and the latter handed the leadership of the software effort over to her as he left the project - but this was after the development itself was over. I am not at all trying to minimize her accomplishments, which included being responsible for the software work, such as release, integration, and debugging during most of the actual flights. However, a lot of people, basically just because of lack of knowledge, give her credit for leading the development or writing of the software as well, which is incorrect.
  - 10y ago