cross pond high tech
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Her Code Got Humans on the Moon — And Invented Software Itself

Her Code Got Humans on the Moon — And Invented Software Itself | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Margaret Hamilton wasn’t supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn—she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly—and digitally—possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo’s command module computer.

“People used to say to me, ‘How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?’” Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie—the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was “going to branch left minus” around the hallway. Outsiders didn’t have a clue. But at the lab, she says, “I was one of the guys.”

Then, as now, “the guys” dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today’s diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

‘When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.’ — Margaret Hamilton

As Hamilton’s career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world’s first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it,” Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, “eating the world.” The world didn’t think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn’t even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. “Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget.” Not at first, anyhow.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

This Wired feature from 2015 tells a must read story for any tech or space fan, and reminds us that

1/ Tech History is key to apprehend Tech

2/ There have been women in tech and engineering, some of them being defining characters : Margaret Hamilton is one of them, along with Ada Lovelace and so many others who deserve a much better recognition.

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This Is The First Web Page ever published

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

20 years ago by CERN In Geneva. The World Wide Web started from there.

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History Of The Tablet : a lot had been tried since 1987 and before Jobs "picked" the idea

History Of The Tablet : a lot had been tried since 1987 and before Jobs "picked" the idea | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Tablets have killed the netbook market and are fast transforming the traditional PC.

 

Apple's iPad gets most of the credit for that, but the tablet computer was not Steve Jobs' idea. Tablets actually began decades before the iPad was launched in 2010.

 

Look at all the previous attemps including the Newton, the Palm Pilot, ...

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Interesting history, that misses a few iconic devices such as IBM's Simon, Eo's Personal Communicator, or the General Magic / Sony's Magic Pad...

Mary Francia's comment, June 3, 2013 1:02 PM
They also missed Philips Nino in 1999 and the home tablet and the medical tablet..... we certainly helped a lot on working out the bugs and getting the market read
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This Was The Internet In 1995

This Was The Internet In 1995 | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

Back in 1995, a public television show called "The Computer Chronicles" made an episode about an emerging technology: "The Net."

 

We found the video after venture capitalist MG Siegler embedded it on his blog.

 

It's pretty insane how far things have come in the last 20 years.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Remember that Pizza Hut was the first e-Commerce site (Maslow is never far) ?

 

Full Wanadoo static HTML tree available from http://blog.dewost.com/2-mai-1996-lancement-de-la-version-1-de-wanad

Nicolas Fodor's comment, April 16, 2013 9:31 PM
On your screenshot it shows 1996 if I am not midsdtaking, in 1995 I am not sure France was not still protecting its juicy minitel market. The interview of John Markoff was 1995 though but that was in the US and the Internet was already commercially available since at least 3 years. "A tout seigneur tout honneur" and it certainly doesn't go to France ;->