Today in Computer Scientists You Haven’t Heard Of: Margaret Hamilton
This is Margaret Hamilton, standing next to one of her earlier projects: The Apollo Guidance Computer’s main operating program.
I’m going to let that sink in for a moment. Look at your image of NASA in the Apollo days. Look at miss Hamilton.
Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the story about how the computer crashed on Neil and Mike on their descent, leaving Neil to make the landing by hand. This story has only the barest grounding in reality.
During the descent, a checklist error left the rendezvous radar – normally used for keeping track of the Command Module in orbit – turned on. Radar is a computationally hungry beast, and the computer unhappily told Neil and Mike that it was being overtasked. It kept right on going, even though it was being overworked. It kept the truly important numbers – altitude, descent rate, fuel consumption – up to date perfectly as they descended, which allowed Neil to fly safely above the lunar surface to find a landing site.
So, here you have a computer, easily the most powerful computer for its size ever made as of 1969, controlling a flying machine above the lunar surface, and correctly juggling multiple real-time processing tasks by priority. This is something that modern computers, fifty years later, still struggle with. Margaret built it and got it right at the very dawn of the multi-tasking operating system. It was something done by Serious Computers – fridge-sized monsters with names like PDP-8 and System/360… and a series of tiny boxes that flew to the moon and back.
And then she went on and did other things. Ever heard the term “Software Engineering”? Margaret’s invention. More technically speaking, she’s responsible for parallel and asynchronous computing (which now is key to every supercomputer and major website), priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and a huge chunk of human-computer interface theory.
She’s still active in software engineering today.
This is what a space wizard looks like.
In her own words:
“Due to an error in the checklist manual, the rendezvous radar switch was placed in the wrong position. This caused it to send erroneous signals to the computer. The result was that the computer was being asked to perform all of its normal functions for landing while receiving an extra load of spurious data which used up 15% of its time. The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I’m overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I’m going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing … Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones … 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.”
This woman programmed a computer smart enough to prioritize tasks and make sure essential functions were carried out first even if other tasks were going on – she’s the one who made the moon landing possible, more than anyone else. If her programming hadn’t been able to prioritize, the mission would’ve been aborted.
She’s also published a ton of papers and basically I’m so tired of people never hearing about all the brilliant coding women. Like, when it was first getting off the ground computer programming was a woman’s field – like they specifically looked for and hired women. There were also a ton of female mathematics BS and PhD candidates in the 30s-50s.
And for the record: all the programmers who created the first general-use computer were women. Wanna know why? The men thought actually building the computer -as in, the design of the machine itself – was more important than programming the computer – as in, actually making it work and telling it how to run, y’know, enabling it to actually be useful.
Men didn’t think programming was important so they relegated it to women, and once they realized programming was the MOST important part of computers they yanked those jobs away, made it a boy thing, and failed to highlight the huge role women played in pioneering the computer age.
For we will be wicked and we will be fair
And they'll call us such names, and we really won't care,
So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes,
There's a place they can go if they're tired of chains,
And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost,
But we'll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost -
We won't take our place on the shelves.
It's better to fly and it's better to die
Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.
In which Hayley Atwell lowkey refuses to diminish the power of women by putting them against each other and promotes sisterhood and female empowerment instead, in like three sentences.
There are many things I love about Phryne Fisher. One of the biggies is how much she likes and is protective of women.
And one of my favourites:
An autistic, academically gifted university student in an otherwise all-male student body is framed, stalked, bullied and slandered.
Phryne doesn’t lay the blame on her, fixate on her differences or say her treatment is justifiable. She imitates her behaviour to understand it, opens up her home as a safe haven, and tries to see the world from the girl’s perspective rather than deciding to coach her to pass.
The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children.
Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.
Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.
the reason the story stops once hellen keller learns to talk is no one wanted to listen to what she had to say
how’s that for a fucking punchline
It’s not that I disagree that we should all be aware of what a badass Helen Keller became, because she had a long and amazing career as an activist and yes, a feminist hero. It’s that somehow when people talk about the ableism of the way Helen’s story is told they always seem to forget this: Anne Sullivan, her teacher, was blind. Seriously. From Wikipedia:
“When she was only five years old she contracted a bacterial eye disease known as trachoma, which created painful infections and over time made her nearly blind.[2] When she was eight, her mother passed away and her father abandoned the children two years later for fear he could not raise them on his own.[2] She and her younger brother, James ("Jimmie”), were sent to an overcrowded almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts (today part of Tewksbury Hospital). He, who suffered a debilitating hip ailment, died three months into their stay. She remained at the Tewksbury house for four years after his death, where she had eye operations that offered some short-term relief for her eye pain but ultimately proved ineffective.[3]“
Eventually some operations did restore part of her eyesight, but by the end of her life she was entirely blind. Also:
"Due to Anne losing her sight at such a young age she had no skills in reading, writing, or sewing and the only work she could find was as a housemaid; however, this position was unsuccessful.[2] Another blind resident staying at the Tewksbury almshouse told her of schools for the blind. During an 1880 inspection of the almshouse, she convinced an inspector to allow her to leave and enroll in the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where she began her studies on October 7, 1880.[2] Although her rough manners made her first years at Perkins humiliating for her, she managed to connect with a few teachers and made progress with her learning.[2] While there, she befriended and learned the manual alphabet from Laura Bridgman, a graduate of Perkins and the first blind and deaf person to be educated there.”
So Anne Sullivan, disabled and born into serious poverty, learns the manual alphabet from a deaf and blind friend; passes that alphabet on to her deaf and blind student. This isn’t the story of an abled-bodied teacher swooping in to ‘save’ a disabled child; it’s a series of disabled women helping each other. Helen Keller’s story is the story not of one badass disabled woman, but of two. Anne and Helen were lifelong friends; Anne died holding Helen’s hand.
Also is there a book called “The Miracle Worker”? I thought that was the movie/movies based on “The Story of My Life” by Helen Keller. But I could be wrong. And I didn’t learn any of this in school in general but that’s neither here nor there.
I can recommend the ‘62 version of “The Miracle Worker” with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It’s blatant about Sullivan’s impoverished background and eye problems – her rage on Helen’s behalf isn’t abstract at all, it’s very, very personal. And that’s the most amazing thing about this movie: Anne and Helen are the angriest people on earth. I have no idea if that was erased from the remakes but in the original they are both allowed to have a ton of anger about what has been done to them and what they have been denied.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Here’s a picture of Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin:
omfg I am so mad right now because not only did the kids biography of Helen Keller I read when I was younger erase all her activism, but it very explicitly completely erased anything about Anne being blind herself.
There were scenes of her WATCHING Helen from across the room or yard, and it was all very “oh my, I just MUST save this poor little disabled girl, no other deaf blind person has EVER BEEN EDUCATED and basically it was awful and shitty.
I think everyone should read Helen and Teacher. It’s an absolute brick of a book, hundreds of pages, but it is wonderful. It’s about their whole lives, right up to Helen’s death in old age. It talks about Helen’s feminism, socialism, and campaigning for everything from equal rights to sexual health. Helen Keller was not a syrupy, greeting card girl who existed to make able people feel warm and fuzzy, she was a tireless academic, political activist and writer. She was making noise about the issues she cared about from the moment her partnership with Annie Sullivan began, and she never stopped.
“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’ ”
“Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grow-up.”
“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”
“Well, let’s not talk about that now,” said Peter.
The one I wanted to throttle was Polly. Lucy is possibly young enough not to really get it yet but Polly was a grown-ass woman and should have known better than to talk that kind of shit about a young woman wanting to stop being a child.
Susan wanted to grow up. She wanted (as mentioned in ‘The Horse And His Boy’) to fall in love and get married. She worried, she protected, she mothered. And she was the only one, the only one out of all of them, who got it right. Aslan told them they had to move on. To grow up. To find him in their own world.
Susan was Aslan’s big fucking success. The others couldn’t do it. They couldn’t take the lessons they’d learned in Narnia into their own world. They couldn’t make a difference there – no, they all spent their time obsessing with getting back. Narnia was heaven for them and they couldn’t function anywhere else, so Aslan took them back one last time to suspend them forever in the only world they wanted.
Narnia was not Susan’s heaven. Narnia was not what Susan wanted. Eternal youth and innocence was not what Susan wanted. Susan wanted to grow. Susan wanted to grow up. Susan wanted love, and family, and her own world. Susan’s heaven was the one drawn from Earth, from a life lived to the full.
Since I was a kid, I have always thought of ‘The Last Battle’ as a very sad story because it is ultimately a story of failure. All the ‘kings and queens of Narnia’ die and are brought back to the dying magical world because they couldn’t accept what Aslan had told them over and over about growing up and moving on. They weren’t supposed to come back. It was a final act of mercy that Aslan allowed them to do so, since they couldn’t bear to live in their own world.
I think Susan would visit them someday, with her queen’s crown and her blazing red lipstick and the lines of growth and character on her face, and very gently explain to the perpetual children in Narnia that she was thankful that Aslan hadn’t taken her with the others. That she was thankful for her children and grandchildren, for boyfriends and husbands, for a life that was full and happy and productive. That she never needed Narnia to be happy. That she missed them, that she’d mourned for them, but she wouldn’t change her own choice for anything.
The other thing is that they had all already grown up once, in Narnia. In Horse and His Boy, there are references to how men try to be Susan’s lovers — and while this may not be intended in a sexual sense, it’s very much a thing that happens to adults, not children.
Whatever childhood she’d managed to cling to after being sent away from the Blitz and having to be mother to her siblings had ended. Puberty doesn’t go two directions, even if they returned to being children physically when they came back through the wardrobe.
The fact that she wanted to move and grow again, that her version of femininity wasn’t Lucy’s or Jill’s or Polly’s, was enough to deny her paradise? Really?
“More girls should join boys’ teams so it could be a tradition and it wouldn’t be so special.” – 13-year-old Mo’Ne Davis, the 18th girl to play in the Little League World Series in its 68-year history, the FIRST girl to throw a Little League World Series SHUTOUT. Her fastball? 70 MILES PER HOUR. #throwlikeagirl #BlackGirlsROCK
knitting in the dark 