Hello ,
I enjoyed hearing from all of you who wrote me after last week's post on A TRAIN IN WINTER by Caroline Moorhead. And thanks for the book recommendations!
Back When Women Got Coffee...
And Wrote Code |
Behind every successful man there's a woman, and here's the woman, Margaret Hamilton, behind Neil Armstrong's small step on the moon 44-years ago this week. She created the computer code that enable the lunar landing.
Margaret Hamilton led the MIT team that developed Apollo 11's on-board computer system.
“I remember thinking, Oh my God, it worked,” the pioneering software engineer told TIME for a copyrighted
article out this week. “I was so happy. But I was more happy about it working than about the fact that we landed.”
Apparently, a short time before the scheduled lunar landing, alarms blew because the computer was processing superfluous information leaving too little room on the computer to run the landing software.
But the work Margaret had done prior to blast off, rigorous testing of the computer software and it's interfaces, paid off. Her
team had programmed the computer to solve the problem itself.
“It got rid of the lesser priority jobs and kept the higher priority jobs, which included the landing functions,” Margaret told TIME.
Margaret is responsible for a computer term we all take for granted these days.
"I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering," Hamilton told Verne's Jaime Rubio Hancock in an interview. "When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other
discipline." Margaret received little attention for her work in 1969, but NASA did award her the Exceptional Space Act Award.
Some of the news coverage she did receive highlights the male chauvinism of the times. One reporter called the 31-year-old woman a
"tiny girl with long blond hair." See more here...
Thanks to Jessie Stickgold-Sarah for the photo and bringing this issue to the forefront on
her blog.
Margaret Hamilton continues her work in computer engineering today, and thing may have improved in general for women since 1969, but in the sciences there
are still far fewer women than men in research jobs, and those women earn substantially less than their male counterparts.
Great post here from the Columbia Journalism Review on the gender gap in the sciences. Is the news media helping or hindering?
Compare the 1969 headline with the one below from July 20, 2015.
Catch me at the Pacific Northwest Library Association Annual Conference, August 6-7, in Vancouver, Washington, I'll be speaking on a panel Nonfiction Rocks! with authors Laurie Ann Thompson and Elizabeth Rusch.
At the same conference I'll join three Spokane writers to talk about Connecting young readers with the writers who love them: How SCBWI can help bring authors and illustrators into your library programming. For full details on the schedule of author and librarian presentations, and for registration click here... |
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