I want you to close your eyes for a second. Imagine
you are suspended in a fragile metal box, effectively
a tin can, exactly 240 ,000 miles away from everything
you have ever known. It is July 20th, 1969. The
lunar surface is rushing up to meet you at thousands
of miles per hour. The eagle is descending. This
is the moment. Exactly. Three minutes. That is
all that separates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
from becoming the first humans to walk on another
world or, you know, becoming a permanent crater
on the Sea of Tranquility. And the tension in
Mission Control is just suffocating. You can
feel it in all the recordings. And then right
at that razor's edge of history, the one thing
keeping them alive, the guidance computer starts
screaming. And it wasn't just a warning light,
not like a check engine light in your car. It
was a full -blown go -no -go crisis. The alarms
flashing were 1201 and 1202. Right. And here
is the terrifying reality of that moment. For
several heart -stopping seconds, nobody, not
the astronauts and not the flight controllers
staring at their screens in Houston, knew exactly
what the computer was trying to tell them. They
had no idea. They didn't know if the brain of
the spacecraft was about to die. And if the brain
dies, the Eagle crashes. It's as simple as that.
The standard narrative here usually pivots to
Neil Armstrong's piloting skills, which were,
I mean, incredible. Don't get me wrong. Oh, absolutely.
A legend. Or the steely nerves of Gene Kranz
in Houston. But that's not the story we are telling
today. We are looking at the story that happened
years before the launch. We are talking about
the person whose logic was sitting inside that
computer, making life or death decisions faster
than any human brain could process. We are talking
about Margaret Hamilton. And while the name has
gained some recognition recently, you might have
seen that photo of her standing next to a stack
of code listings as tall as she is. It's an iconic
photo. It is, but I don't think most people grasp
the technical magnitude of what she achieved.
She didn't just, you know, write code. She literally
invented the discipline required to write it.
She coined the term software engineering. That
is what gets me every single time. She gave the
job its name. The mission for this date dive
is to move past the Wikipedia summary. We are
going to dig into the source material to understand
how a student of philosophy Yes, philosophy ended
up as the director of the software engineering
division at the MIT Instrumentation Lab. Right.
And we need to understand the Wild West of 1960s
computing because there were no rules, there
were no textbooks, and there was no stack overflow
to copy -paste from. You were on your own. Yeah,
you couldn't just Google the error message. Not
at all. And we are going to do a proper technical
breakdown of the code itself. We need to unpack
the asynchronous executive and the specific logic
that saved Apollo 11 because, and this isn't
an exaggeration, without... her specific approach
to error prevention, the moon landing simply
doesn't happen. And we'll wrap up by looking
at her career post -NASA, which I think is arguably
even more relevant to us today. She pivoted from
how do we fix errors to how do we mathematically
prove errors can't exist. It's a whole different
mindset. A total paradigm shift. But let's start
at the beginning. Margaret Heffield Hamilton,
born 1936. Indiana born, Michigan raised. When
we look at her college years, I don't see rocket
scientist on the transcript. Not at all. No,
you see a really curious mix. She started at
the University of Michigan in 55. Then she transferred
to Earlham College. She graduated in 1958 with
a degree in mathematics. Okay, so math is there.
That makes sense. Right. But if you look closer,
there is a minor on that transcript that does
a lot of heavy lifting later on. Philosophy.
Philosophy. It feels like a distraction, doesn't
it? If you're studying hard math, why spend time
on abstract thought? Well, she credits her father,
who is a poet. and her grandfather a headmaster
for that interest but think about what philosophy
actually is it isn't just sitting around asking
why are we here right it's the study of logic
it's the study of systems of thought you learn
how to construct an argument how to find flaws
in a logical chain it's about abstraction so
it's meta thinking thinking about how we think
exactly and when you are about to enter a field
that doesn't exist yet where there are no manuals
and no established procedures you can't rely
on rote memorization there's no Nothing to memorize.
There are no rules to follow. You have to rely
on systems thinking. You have to be able to look
at a problem abstractly and derive the rules
yourself. That philosophical background likely
gave her the ability to see the architecture
behind the code, not just the commands themselves.
She could see the forest, not just the trees.
So she has the math. She has the logic. She graduates
in 58. The plan was to be a professor, right?
She was heading to Brandeis to study abstract
math. That was the plan. But, you know, life
intervened. Her husband was at Harvard Law School.
They needed money to support him through that,
so she put her own graduate studies on hold.
So she starts looking for work. She starts looking
for work, and she takes a job in mid -1959 at
MIT. She landed in the meteorology department
working for a man named Edward Norton Lorenz.
Okay, I recognize that name immediately. Lorenz
is the chaos theory guy. He is the father of
chaos theory. But wait, 1959. Chaos theory wasn't
a thing yet, was it? That term comes later. Not
officially, no. And this is where the story gets
so fascinating. Margaret was there at the incubation.
She was tasked with writing software to predict
weather on these massive, clunky machines, the
LGP -30 and the PDP -1. The LGP -30. I looked
this up. It's the size of a desk. weighs 800
pounds, and probably had less computing power
than a musical birthday card. Oh, much, much
less. And it was loud. And you had to feed it
instructions on paper tape. It was a very physical
process. So what was she actually doing? She
was programming it to solve these huge sets of
differential equations, trying to model weather
patterns. They'd run these long simulations,
printing out the results as they went. And this
is where the famous discovery happens. This is
it. One day, Lorenz wanted to rerun a simulation
from the middle. So instead of starting from
zero, he took a printout from halfway through,
typed the numbers back into the computer, and
set it running again. And he expected to get
the same results as the first run, just from
that point forward. Of course. Same inputs, same
math, should be the same outputs. But the result
was completely different. The new simulation
diverged wildly from the original. Why? If the
math is the same, the result should be the same.
You would think. But the computer, internally,
stored numbers to six decimal places. The printer,
to save paper and time, only printed out three.
A rounding error. A tiny, tiny rounding error.
So when they typed the numbers back in, they
were rounding off these microscopic fractions.
Something like 0 .506127 became just 0 .506.
And that tiny difference changed the weather.
It changed everything. It completely diverged.
This was the discovery of sensitive dependence
on initial conditions, which we now call the
butterfly effect. The idea that a butterfly flapping
its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in
Texas. And Margaret Hamilton was the one programming
these. machines when this realization was happening
she was right there she saw firsthand that in
a complex system a microscopic error doesn't
just result in a microscopic mistake it can cascade
into total chaos That is a terrifying lesson
to learn right before you go to work on a spaceship.
Yeah. That must have stuck with her. It absolutely
did. It's a foundational experience. Because
what you're saying is she learned firsthand that
you cannot just hope the system holds together.
You can't assume that small inputs will only
have small outputs. I can have massive, unpredictable
outputs. Precisely. She took that lesson, that
systems are fragile and nonlinear, and she carried
it with her for the rest of her career. And she
did all this without ever taking a class in computing.
Like, because they didn't exist. Right. She said
the field was so new that nobody could tell you
that you were doing it wrong because nobody knew
what right looked like yet. It was pure on -the
-job training you learned by doing and by, well,
crashing the system and figuring out why. So
she leaves the weather lab, and in 1961, she
moves to the Lincoln Lab at MIT to work on a
project called SAGE. The semi -automatic ground
environment. This sounds like the setting for
a Dr. Strangelove movie. It practically was.
SAGE was a massive Cold War project. The U .S.
military had built these colossal computers,
the AMFSQ -7, which were the largest computers
ever built. Each one took up an entire building,
weighed 250 tons, and had something like 60 ,000
vacuum tubes. Unbelievable. What was it for?
It was a networked air defense system. It took
in radar data from all over North America, and
its goal was to identify unfriendly aircraft.
Soviet bombers? Exactly. The software was supposed
to track incoming Soviet bombers and help guide
interceptor jets to shoot them down before they
reached American cities. So if the weather software
crashes, maybe you need an umbrella when you
thought it would be sunny if Sage crashes? We
all die. Okay, so the stakes were just a little
bit higher. The stakes were absolute. This was
military grade computing. It was the proven ground
for high reliability systems. But there is a
specific story from her time at Sage that I think
perfectly illustrates who Margaret Hamilton was.
The Greek and Latin story. Yes. This is a classic
example of hazing in the engineering world. It
was a sort of rite of passage. Explain this to
me, because it sounds like a complete waste of
taxpayer money to be hazing people on a critical
military defense project. Well, think of it as
a stress test. When a new programmer arrived,
especially someone without a formal background,
the veterans, the priesthood of coders, would
assign them a specific program to fix. A trick
program. Exactly. It was known to be impossible.
It was incredibly complex, convoluted logic.
It had never run properly. And just to make it
impossible to debug, the original author had
written all the comments in the code in Greek
and Latin. So you open the file. And instead
of instructions saying this function calculates
altitude, it's it's literally all Greek to you.
Essentially, it was designed to be unreadable.
The goal was to watch the new kid panic and fail.
Nobody was supposed to be able to run it. It
was just a way to humble the new recruits and,
you know, see who cracked under pressure. So
they hand this to Margaret. What does she do?
She doesn't panic and she doesn't try to translate
the Greek. She realizes the comments are a distraction.
They are noise. She looks past them at the raw
logic. the binary the actual flow of the data
through the machine she reverse engineered it
completely she figured out what it was actually
trying to do and she found the flaws in the logic
and she fixed it she made it run the impossible
he made it run and then for the ultimate flex
oh i love this part When she got it to output
the answers, she programmed it to print them
out in Latin and Greek. That is fantastic. That
is the coding equivalent of catching a punch
and hitting the other guy with his own hand.
It really is. But deeper than the joke, it established
her reputation. It proved she wasn't just a coder.
She was a systems thinker, a problem solver who
couldn't be intimidated by complexity or, you
know, deliberate obfuscation. She couldn't be
bullied. She could not. And that reputation is
what put her on the radar for the apocalypse.
So let's go to the moon. It's around 1963 when
she leaves SAGE. And then she joins the MIT Instrumentation
Lab, which had the contract for the Apollo guidance
system. Right. And she said she saw an ad about
the Apollo project and just found the idea of
a moon program very exciting. It was the challenge
of a lifetime. She joins the lab. Yeah. And we
need to be very clear about her role here because
history tends to flatten these things. She wasn't
just a programmer on the team. No, she was the
first programmer hired for the Apollo project
at MIT and obviously the first female programmer.
That is a lonely position to be in. The first
person through the door. Incredibly lonely. And
she eventually rose to be the director of the
software engineering division, leading a team
of hundreds. But it was an uphill battle the
entire way. Not just because of her gender, though
that was certainly part of it, but because of
her discipline. Right, the hardware versus software
culture war. This was a real thing. It was a
caste system. In the 1960s, engineering meant
hardware. It meant building rockets, fuel pumps,
circuits, metal. That was seen as real work.
Tangible things you could hold. Exactly. Software.
That was viewed as a secondary support task.
It was seen as typing or something women did.
It wasn't considered a science. It was almost
like a craft. Which is so ironic because the
hardware is just a heavy, expensive paperweight
without the software to tell it where to go and
what to do. Completely. But the hardware gurus
didn't see it that way. They thought software
was something you did at the end, like, you know,
painting the rocket. Hamilton realized early
on that this attitude was incredibly dangerous.
Because if you treat it as an afterthought. You
get bugs. And in space, bugs kill people. There
are no second chances. So she realized they needed
more rigor. more discipline they needed to be
seen as equals to the hardware engineers so she
starts fighting for legitimacy she did she started
using the term software engineering she combined
the words deliberately she was making a statement
she was saying we are not just typing we are
engineering a system with the same rigor the
same mathematical foundation and the same discipline
that you use to build a thruster and they laughed
at her is that true it was an ongoing joke for
a while The sources say the hardware guys would
kid her about her radical ideas. They thought
it was hilarious that this woman from the typing
pool wanted to call what she did engineering.
Unbelievable. Until they realized she was right.
Until the problem started getting so complex
that they couldn't solve them without her team.
There was a turning point, a specific meeting
where a very respected hardware expert, one of
the gods of the lab, finally stood up and admitted,
essentially, she's right. What they are doing
is engineering. That must have been a huge moment.
Hamilton said it was. It was the moment they
stopped being the help and started being partners
in the mission. And they had a lot of work to
do. Her team was responsible for all the onboard
in -flight software. Everything. The command
module software that got them to the moon and
back, and the lunar module software for the landing
itself, and later they even did the software
for the Skylab space station. What was the key
focus? What was the philosophy behind the software?
It was all about reliability. error detection,
error recovery, and this concept of man -in -the
-loop capabilities. How do the humans and the
computer interact safely under extreme stress?
That was her obsession. Let's get into the weeds
of that code then, because this is Section 4,
the architecture of survival. And I want to really
understand this, because the critique we've heard
of other explanations is that they dumb it down
too much. Let's do it. We need to talk about
the asynchronous executive. Yeah. The previous
explanation I've heard used a grocery store analogy,
like checking out customers. But that feels too
linear, too simple. It is too linear. A grocery
line is a queue. First come, first served. You
wait your turn. The Apollodidon's computer could
not afford to wait its turn. A better analogy
is an emergency room doctor on a Saturday night.
Okay, I'm the doctor. The CPU. You are the CTU.
You have a patient with a sprained ankle. Let's
call that job updating the astronaut's display.
It's important the patient is in pain, but it's
not life -threatening, so you're working on that.
I'm wrapping the ankle. Then suddenly the ambulance
doors burst open and a patient comes in on a
stretcher with a massive heart attack. That job
is fire the descent engine to stop us crashing
into the moon. Okay, that's a bit more important
than the ankle. Just a bit. In a normal linear
computer, a grocery line computer, you'd have
to finish taking the ankle before you could even
look at the heart attack patient. And the heart
attack patient dies. Exactly. The eagle crashes.
Hamilton's team, utilizing a brilliant design
by a man named Jay Halcombe Laning, built an
asynchronous executive. It's a system based on
interrupts and priorities. So what does that
mean in the ER? The moment the heart attack patient
arrives, the system literally freezes the ankle
taping job mid -motion. It saves the state of
that job, where the tape was, what you're thinking
about, and it shoves it onto a back burner. Instantly,
your entire brain, all your processing power,
switches to the heart attack. It's ruthless prioritization.
Ruthless and automatic. It creates a hierarchy
of survival. The computer's programming had a
list of jobs with priority ratings. Landing the
vehicle was at the top. Everything else was below
it. The computer knew, without being told, that
keeping the ship upright was more important than
talking to the astronaut. But this introduces
a new problem, right? The human interface. If
the computer is jumping between tasks like that,
how does the astronaut know what's happening?
That was the priority display challenge, and
it was a huge focus for Hamilton. She designed
routines where the computer could interrupt the
astronauts. It could overwrite their screen if
it had something urgent to say. But she realized
this created a deadly new risk. The man -in -the
-loop problem. The human is too slow. Exactly.
Imagine you are the astronaut. You're about to
press a button to say, turn on the landing radar.
your finger is moving toward the button. In that
split second, the computer has a problem and
decides to interrupt you. It changes the screen
to a different menu, and now that same button
means jettison the engine. And my finger is already
moving. I press the button. And you've just jettisoned
the engine you need to land because the computer
changed the context faster than your brain could
react. That is a UI nightmare. How did she solve
that? With a surprisingly simple, low -tech human
rule that was drilled into the astronauts during
training. Count to five. Count to five. That's
it. That was the core of it. Yeah. If a priority
display pops up, if the screen changes unexpectedly,
the rule was you take your hands off the controls
and wait five seconds. Let the system settle.
Make sure the switchover is complete before you
touch anything. It's a human buffer for a machine
that's too fast. Precisely. It's such a low -tech
solution to a high -tech problem, but it was
critical for preventing accidental disasters.
And then there is this feature that really saved
the day on Apollo 11, the kill and recompute.
This sounds aggressive. It is the ultimate fail
-safe. Think about your laptop. If it freezes,
what do you do? I hold the power button down.
It shuts off, I swear a bit, and I probably lose
the document I was working on. Right. In space,
you cannot lose the document. You cannot lose
your navigation alignment. If you restart from
zero, you don't know where you are and you tumble.
So, Hamilton's team... built a restart protection
system. How did it work? The software was constantly
taking snapshots of critical data, your position,
your velocity, your orientation. It was saving
these to protected areas of memory, like a series
of safe checkpoints. Like a save game in a video
game. That's a perfect analogy. It's a save game
checkpoint. If the software ever realized it
was confused or getting corrupt data or about
to crash, it wouldn't just blue screen. It was
programmed to detect its own failure. And then
what? it would perform a soft reboot. It would
flush all the currently running lower priority
tasks, reload the last known safe snapshot of
critical data, and restart its processing from
that safe point. And it could do all this in
milliseconds. So it was designed to fail and
recover so fast the human might not even notice.
That was the goal. It was resilience by design.
The system assumed failure could happen and was
built to survive it. And that brings us to the
climax. July 20th, 1969. The ultimate test of
that resilience. All those years of philosophical
thinking and design choices are about to be put
on trial. We are back in the Eagle. Three minutes
to landing. Ah! And the alarms start. Yeah. 1201,
1202. Right. And to understand why this happened,
we have to look at a piece of hardware called
the rendezvous radar. This is the radar they
would use to find the mothership, the command
module, if they had to abort the landing and
fly back up, right? Correct. It wasn't needed
for the landing itself. But, and there is some
debate here among historians and even the astronauts,
but the prevailing theory from the engineers
points to the switch position. The rendezvous
radar switch was likely left in a mode that it
shouldn't have been. So it was on when it should
have been off. It's a little more complex than
that. It was likely about the phasing of the
power supply to the radar. Due to the switch
position, the radar was receiving power that
was out of phase with the computer's power supply.
This created electrical interference. Like static.
Just noise. Massive noise. The radar started
sending thousands of phantom signals interrupts
to the computer every second. It was essentially
screaming, read me, read me, read me at the CPU,
demanding attention for a job that wasn't even
important at that moment. So the computer is
trying to do the incredibly complex math for
the descent, which is already hard. And suddenly
it has this screaming child in the backseat kicking
the chair over and over. An excellent analogy.
And then the straw that broke the camel's back.
Buzz Aldrin, following his training, enters a
command, 1668. And what does command 1668 do?
It asks the computer to calculate and display
the difference in altitude delta. Buzz wanted
to double check their height against what he
was seeing out the window. A totally reasonable
request. He had done it in simulations a hundred
times. But the simulations didn't have the radar
screaming in the background. Exactly. The system
was designed to handle a workload of about 85
% of its total capacity to leave a safety margin.
With the landing software running and now this
constant barrage of radar interrupts, it was
already pushed near its limit. When Aldrin asked
for that extra display calculation, that was
the eighth major task on a system built to handle
seven, the demand on the CPU hit something like
115%. Overload. Total saturation. In any other
computer of that era, probably any other computer
on Earth at that moment, the system would have
frozen. It would have crashed. The thrusters
would have locked in their last position. The
eagle would have tumbled and crashed into the
moon. But it didn't freeze. The 1201 alarm flashed.
And that alarm was the software talking. It was
the system communicating its state. 1201 meant
executive overflow. The asynchronous executive,
the ER doctor, looked at the list of tasks and
said. I have too much to do. I cannot process
all of this in the time I have. And here is where
the genius of the design, the genius of Margaret
Hamilton's philosophy kicks in. It didn't quit.
No, it made a management decision. It looked
at its prioritized list of jobs and said. updating
Buzz Aldrin's display. That is low priority.
Kill it. Servicing those screaming radar interrupts,
not critical for landing. Kill it. Firing the
descent engine to keep us from dying. Highest
priority. Keep that running at all costs. It
effectively told the astronauts, shut up, I'm
busy saving your life. That is exactly what it
did. It shed the load. It performed one of those
soft reboots, a kill and recompute, cleared the
queue of low -priority junk, reloaded the last
safe data, and kept the engines firing. And it
did this multiple times during the final descent.
And in Houston, this is where the human element
on the ground becomes critical. Jack Garman.
Jack Garman, a young NASA computer engineer,
one of the backroom guys, he was looking at his
console. He had a cheat sheet of all the possible
error codes taped onto the glass on his desk.
Because Margaret Hamilton had insisted on rigorous
testing and creating these very specific error
definitions, Garmin knew what 1201 meant. He
knew it wasn't a death rattle. It wasn't the
computer dying. He knew it was the opposite.
He knew it meant the computer was working perfectly.
It was doing its job, shedding tasks to survive.
So he yelled into the intercom to the flight
director, go, go. He gave them the go. He gave
them the go. If he hadn't understood that, if
they had hesitated for even a few seconds, the
mission rules were clear. They would have had
to abort. So Margaret Hamilton's code didn't
just fly the ship. It gave mission control the
information and the confidence to stay in the
fight. Hamilton wrote about this later in a letter
to Datamation magazine. She said, and I'm paraphrasing,
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. It's just chilling to think about. The
margin between a ticker tape parade and a global
memorial service was a few lines of priority
logic in a 72 kilobyte computer. It really was.
The whole mission balanced on that knife's edge.
So Apollo 11 lands. History is made. Margaret
Hamilton is a legend inside the lab. But her
story doesn't end in 1969. And this is the part
that I think is most critical for our listeners,
especially anyone working in tech or systems
today. Section 6. The Post -Apollo Methodology.
This is where she pivots from being a heroic
firefighter to being a fire marshal. She looked
back at the Apollo project and realized that
what they did was amazing, but it was also exhausting
and, in a way, inefficient. They spent thousands
and thousands of hours testing, finding bugs,
and fixing them. finding the mistakes after they've
been made. Right. But she asked a deeper, more
philosophical question. Why do we allow errors
to exist in the first place? It sounds like a
utopian question. I mean, come on. Code always
has bugs. That's just the rule of the universe.
Or do we just accept that it does? Because that's
how we've always done it. In 1976, she co -founded
a company called Higher Order Software, or HOS.
And later, in 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies.
And through these companies, she developed a
concept she called Universal Systems Language,
or USL. Okay, let's unpack USL. Yeah. What is
the core idea here? It sounds very abstract.
The core philosophy is development before the
fact. Development before the fact. Explain that
to me. Think about how we build almost all software
today. You write some code, you compile it, you
run it, it crashes, you say, oops, you go into
the debugger, you find the mistake, and you patch
it. We call it agile. We iterate. We iterate
on failure. We test after the fact to find the
errors we built in. So it's like building a house
with a blueprinting software that physically
prevents you from putting a door where a load
-bearing wall needs to be. It just won't let
you draw it. That is a perfect analogy. If the
design is mathematically sound and complete,
the code that is automatically generated from
it will be reliable by definition. It moves the
focus from software reliability, which is asking,
is the code good, to system reliability, which
asks, is the logic sound. And when you look at
the world today, I mean, you look at major software
outages that take down airlines and banks or
the constant stream of security patches for our
phones because of vulnerabilities. It feels like
we went in the complete opposite direction of
Hamilton's philosophy. We absolutely did. The
industry, by and large, chose speed over rigor.
The mantra became move fast and break things.
Hamilton's philosophy was move deliberately and
break nothing. And in a world where software
is now controlling self -driving cars, pacemakers
and national. power grids, her approach of development
before the fact is arguably more relevant now
than it was in 1969. I believe so. It's a road
not taken, or at least a road less traveled by
the mainstream. But it's a standard we might
need to return to as the stakes get higher and
higher. Let's look at her legacy. Because for
a long time, she was a bit of a hidden figure
outside of engineering circles. But the last
decade has really seen her get her flowers, so
to speak. The recognition has been cascading,
and it's been wonderful to see. In 2003, NASA
gave her the Exceptional Space Act Award. And
this is a great detail. It included a check for
$37 ,200. That seems... Oddly specific. Why that
amount? At the time, it was the largest individual
financial award NASA had ever given to anyone
in its history. It was their way of saying, you
know, we know you and this is the biggest thank
you we're allowed to give. That's incredible.
And then the big one in 2016. The Presidential
Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Obama,
he draped it around her neck, and that is the
highest civilian honor in the United States.
And the citation explicitly credited her with
creating the software concepts that allowed for
the moon landing. She also got into the National
Aviation Hall of Fame and became a Computer History
Museum fellow. But I have to ask about the pop
culture stuff. Because you know you've really
made it when you're a Lego. Oh, absolutely. The
Women of NASA Lego set. Yeah. It's fantastic.
It features her in her 1960s outfit, and it actually
includes a tiny Lego stack of the code books
next to her. Recreating that iconic photo. Yes.
And there was another beautiful tribute by Google
back in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the
landing. They went to the Ivanpah Solar Power
Facility, you know, that massive array of mirrors
in the Mojave Desert. The one that looks like
a sci -fi power plant. That's the one. They programmed
over 100 ,000 of those mirrors to reflect the
moonlight, literally moonlight, to create a giant
portrait of Margaret Hamilton on the landscape
visible from above. A portrait drawn in moonlight.
That is poetry. It's perfect. And for the TV
fans out there, if you watch the show For All
Mankind on Apple TV plus Bink, the character
of Margot Madison is heavily inspired by her.
The glasses, the intense drive, the sheer brilliance.
But beyond the Legos and the medals, her biggest
victory, I think, has to be that name. software
engineering. It really is. In 2018, the IE Software
Journal celebrated the 50th anniversary of the
discipline. They were celebrating the very field
she named. It went from being a joke that hardware
guys laughed at to being the dominant, most important
industry of the 21st century. She hired the sheriffs
for the Wild West. She did. She proved that code
wasn't magic and it wasn't just typing. She proved
it was an engineering discipline that could be
trusted with human lives. So to wrap this all
up. Margaret Hamilton didn't just write code.
She created the entire environment, the philosophy,
where code could survive chaos. From that trick
Greek and Latin program where she outsmarted
the hazing ritual to the moment she taught a
computer to ignore a screaming radar and land
on the moon, she consistently solved the impossible.
And she did it by sticking to her guns, by trusting
her logic and her rigor when the rest of the
world told her she was just support staff. So
here is a final thought for you to chew on. We
live in a world of beta tests and move fast and
break things. We accept that our apps will crash.
We accept that our smart fridges might need a
reboot. Margaret Hamilton's philosophy was that
errors are not inevitable. They are a failure
of design. As we build ever more complex AI and
autonomous systems that will hold our lives in
their digital hands, why have we moved so far
away from the failure is not an option? rigor
of Apollo. Maybe it's time we stopped just fixing
bugs and started, really started, preventing
them from ever being born. Development before
the fact. It's a powerful idea whose time may
have come again. If you haven't seen that photo
of her with a stack of code, go Google it right
now. It is the definition of iconic. Thanks for
taking this deep dive with us. It was a pleasure.
See you next time.