Thursday, December 11, 2014

Wanna know who *really* landed a man on the moon?


A woman named Margaret.

https://medium.com/@3fingeredfox/margaret-hamilton-lead-software-engineer-project-apollo-158754170da8

More info on Wikipedia.  Excerpt:
Hamilton's work prevented an abort of the Apollo 11 moon landing: Three minutes before the Lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, several computer alarms were triggered. The computer was overloaded with incoming data, because the rendezvous radar system (not necessary for landing) updated an involuntary counter in the computer, which stole cycles from the computer. Due to its robust architecture, the computer was able to keep running; the Apollo onboard flight software was developed using an asynchronous executive so that higher priority jobs (important for landing) could interrupt lower priority jobs. 
Smart engineer.

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