Crónica.

GA2-240202501-AA1-EV03

APRENDIS:

JUAN FARID TORRES RODRIGUEZ

TECNOLOGIA

ANALISIS Y DESARROLLO DEL SOFTWARE

INSTRUCTOR

ANA CAROLINA QUINTERO NEGRETTE

2023

MARGARET HAMILTON

He was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation

Laboratory,1 where with his team he developed the "on-board" navigation software for the

Apollo Space Program.234 He was founder, in 1976, from Higher Order Software. In 1986,

she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge,

Massachusetts. The company was developed around the universal systems language based

on its "Development Before the Fact" (DBTF) paradigm for software design systems.5 It

coined the term "software engineering" to distinguish between hardware work and other
engineering. Although his idea was not well received at first, eventually the software

generated the same respect as other disciplines.67

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented

by former United States President Barack Obama,

for his work at NASA during the Apollo missions.89

Career path

She moved to Massachusetts with the intention of pursuing graduate studies at Brandeis,

but instead took a position at MIT as a software developer. From 1961 to 1963, he worked

for the Philco-Ford Sage Project, where he used radars to track unknown aircraft

trajectories. He also wrote code for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory. He

worked to gain first-hand experience at a time when computer science and software

engineering did not exist as disciplines or as university courses.

Margaret Hamilton was part of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, where in 1965

she became responsible for the development of the flight software on board the Apollo

mission computers25 on which the laboratory team worked,26 and later He directed and

supervised the development of the Skylab space station mission.27

SAGE Project

From 1961 to 1963, Hamilton worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment

(SAGE) Project at MIT Lincoln Lab,28 where she was one of the programmers who wrote

software for the AN/FSQ-7 computer prototype (the XD-1). ), used by the United States Air
Force to search for possibly hostile aircraft.29 He also wrote software for a satellite

tracking project at the Air Force's Cambridge Research Laboratories.28 Project SAGE was

an extension of the Project Whirlwind, initiated by MIT to create a computer system that

could predict weather systems and track their movements using simulators. SAGE was

soon developed for military use in anti-aircraft air defense.

Apollo 11

One of his greatest achievements during the direction of the development of the operating

system for the Apollo missions was the system of exceptions and asynchronous task

loading that played a crucial role moments before the moon landing of the Apollo 11

mission, since when the astronauts were preparing to descend, the computer began to throw

errors 1201 and 1202. For a few minutes they did not know whether to proceed with the

moon landing or not due to the error displayed by the computer, but Hamilton's team

quickly found among their notes that this code meant that the The computer was clearing

the task list of low-priority processes to dedicate all processing to downstream functions.

Key messages were exchanged from the command module to NASA's deep space

communications complex in Robledo de Chavela, Madrid, and from there to Houston,

NASA's operations center. From there the messages returned to Robledo de Chavela and

then again to the lunar module where the astronauts were. Due to the spontaneity of the

situation and the difficulty of communications, it was not possible to exchange much

information at that time, so speed and immediacy were key aspects for the success of the

mission. Before the doubts of the mission Commander, Neil Armstrong, about whether to

carry out the moon landing or not, the answer was granted by Margaret Hamilton, who

assured that it could be carried out safely. Once the question of what the error message
meant was resolved, the descent on the Moon was carried out, which was successful.31

Later it was discovered that the error messages were not due to a software problem, but

rather in the list of processes that was given to Buzz Aldrin for the preparation of the

instruments, he was instructed to turn on a radar that was not used during the descent, but

that could be useful if the mission needed to be aborted, this radar began to fill the

processing of the system with measurement tasks due to all types of readings that were

coming from its sensors,32 thanks to the fact that Hamilton and his team took into account

how to solve a problem of this type, the event did not end in any incident

Another notable moment during the design phase of

the navigation system for the Apollo missions was
the detection of a Bug thanks to Lauren, daughter of
Margaret Hamilton, who was playing with the
computer's hybrid simulation system, and
accidentally activated the program. "pre-launch"
(prelaunch or p01) during a mission, achieving a
system error that resulted in the deletion of the
navigation data already loaded. Given the incident,
Hamilton proposed a modification to the system to
prevent it from happening on a real mission, but the
administration responded that it did not consider the
possibility since the astronauts were trained to avoid this type of
human error. However, during the Apollo 8 mission, and even though Hamilton

documented the problem clearly, the astronauts accidentally ran the p01 program in the
middle of the mission, entering critical mode without flight data, but thanks to Hamilton it

was documented how to get back to it. resend the navigation data in case this accident

occurred. Shortly after the incident, Hamilton's originally proposed changes were approved

for subsequent missions.

What discovery did Margaret Hamilton make?

Computer Pioneers - Margaret Hamilton

Contributions. She was one of those responsible for designing the software that allowed

weather prediction using the LGP-30 and PDP-1 computers. Margaret was in charge of

developing the software for the first AN/FSQ-7 computer that searched for “unfriendly”

aircraft in North American airspace.