Dawn Ahukanna
mhoyeA picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.
On a more serious note, I didn't realize that Hamilton coined the term "software engineer".
Mark T. Tomczak@mhoye Oh, that Hamilton! Sorry, I had musicals on the brain.
Speaking of... She deserves a musical.
Emma needs ☕️ and paying work
Ludwig Vielfrass
Sara Joy 
@mhoye didn't know that either.
Honestly man the more I learn about women in computing in history, the madder I am about the state of tech today.
Third spruce tree on the leftYeah. Grace Hopper, the women of Bletchley Park, the "hidden figures" of NASA like Katherine Johnson who did the math to put Glenn in orbit and Dorothy Vaughn who ran the computers (the movie is ok, but total white savior bullshit).
I want to see more women in charge of tech. I want more badass tech-sisters running things.
@tezoatlipoca @mhoye I'd be happy if they weren't even badass, but you know, ran this stuff like they're not trying to emulate comic book bad guys, like the current oligarchical tech leaders seem to be.
@tezoatlipoca @mhoye saying that Grace Hopper was indeed badass and had a sharp wit: https://front-end.social/@sarajw/113165853835788408
Sara Joy :happy_pepper: (@[email protected])
Oh! I've just watched the first 5 mins, definitely going to watch it all. She's legit already funny. https://mastodon.social/@kottke/113165803319008468
@sarajw @mhoye I'm old enough to remember when I got into this field when there were more women in it. Back then, it was a way to make a decent living, but not a path to riches.
That changed with the internet boom and I ran into fewer women developers and sysadmins. Once it got out of its "clerical" status and into a path to riches, the demographics shifted. My first dev job iin 1990 was 40% women devs to 60%.
I've worked in places since then with NO women devs. Those all sucked, BTW.
Space Hobo@spacehobo is it just going to make me more mad or give me something constructive to do about it?
Otherwise nowadays I can only cope with fiction, novels, I need the escapism...
@spacehobo @lerxst @mhoye thank you either way, I'd like to know but it might make me feel very frustrated about what could have been..
+>e@sarajw @lerxst @mhoye here's a decent article on the subject (despite being on the guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech-industry-wrote-women-out-of-history
@eons yeeep:
"But by the 1970s, there was a change in mindset and women were no longer welcome in the workplace: the government and industry had grown wise to just how powerful computers were and wanted to integrate their use at a management level. “But they weren’t going to put women workers – seen as low level drones – in charge of computers,” explains Hicks. Women were systematically phased out and replaced by men who were paid more and had better job titles."
Also:
If women had continued to be a major force in computing, instead of being sidelined, the way the tech industry looks today would have been very different, she argues. “If women had been a more important part of the high tech industry all along, would so many platforms and apps have the same problems with rampant sexism and misogyny both in their workplaces and their products? Most likely not.”
The Janx Devil
Howard Chu @ Symas@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye yep. Kay McNulty was one of them, from just a bit up the road from my house. https://www.womensmuseumofireland.ie/exhibits/kay-mcnulty
@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye they have a monument dedicated to her at her birthplace now. I like to visit it every year...
@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye I don't recall any of these women being mentioned in my courses at UMich. But I knew Grace Hopper coined "computer bug" (but it was an actual bug, a moth, that fried itself on a circuit). Probably just picked up in outside reading. I learned about Kay from reading about ENIAC, because the EECS department had a slice of it (1/10th) on display. I learned about Margaret because... a colleague of mine at the UM Computing Center looked like her. https://websites.umich.edu/~umvm/MIDAC/midac_eniac.html
ENIAC Programmers Project
In 1946 six brilliant young women programmed ENIAC, the first digital computer, a secret WWII US Army project. Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the public, the women were never introduced and remained invisible to history. Kathy Kleiman produced the documentary The Computers to tell their story.
craignicol@craignicol @mhoye absolutely!
kit
sport of sacred spherical cowsYeah, and ever since then whole generations of programming boys have been cosplaying as her, despite most of them having not anywhere near half the responsibility.
@mhoye Yup, she's (not as) widely recognized (as I thought, apparently) as the founder of software engineering.
DNA schedule@mhoye I read that she also coined the term "test harness"
Amgine
Ross of Ottawa@mhoye not a single reference to Outlook in the entire stack of documents.
Shawn Hooper (he/him) 🇨🇦@shawnhooper @mhoye workplace safety hazard
jd 🔆@ottaross @shawnhooper @mhoye
I notice the handy plug on the wall in case they need to, you know, unplug it/wait 30 seconds/ plug it back in.
I notice the handy plug on the wall in case they need to, you know, unplug it/wait 30 seconds/ plug it back in.
@shawnhooper @ottaross ... and we've been shipping with papercuts ever since.
Benjamin Geer@mhoye On the other hand, Michael Collins did have to turn something off and on again to fix a problem
Brett R@mhoye I use the first pic to teach the difference between the purpose of a caption and alt text, with a guerilla casual mention of how much we owe Hamilton and similar minimized women.
MrAlanCooperIn 2017 Margaret Hamilton was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows. On that occasion I was privileged to accompany her on a private, docent-guided tour of the Museum's public display.
She looked about the same as she does in these pictures from the 1960s, albeit a little grayer; a bright, diminutive grandma.
But she was very humble and human. At one point we rounded a corner into the Apollo section. Prominently in the front of the exhibit was a reproduction of your left-hand photo. Upon seeing it, Margaret stopped and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh! Is that me?"
As Margaret explained it to me, NASA wanted the lunar lander's actual landing to be 100% automated with no manual override. She disagreed, and insisted on implementing an override. NASA didn't like the idea but Margaret just went ahead and wrote it.
Of course, on Apollo 11's final approach, the lander was headed for a field of giant boulders. Neil Armstrong used Margaret's code to override the computer and manually divert to the actual, safer, landing point.
barsoomcore@mralancooper @mhoye what a legend.
As I have written before:
Margaret E Hamilton
Her name is Margaret E Hamilton
She wrote 400,000 lines of code
Without one bug, without one bug
Adam Shostack 
@mralancooper @mhoye There’s a great history of the debate in a book “Digital Apollo.” I would love to have heard her story!
@adamshostack @mhoye Thanks for the pointer. I just ordered the book.
Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦
James Baker 🍁
itgrrl @mralancooper @mhoye she’s a genuine legend, what an amazing opportunity! 💕
this may be of interest… 👇
itgrrl :donor: (@[email protected])
Attached: 4 images @[email protected] @[email protected] well since you mention it… I also made these stickers 🙃 the switch & the stickers (& a life-size standee of Margaret Hamilton & a DSKY) were for a display on the Apollo Guidance Computer that I put together for a recent vintage computer fair here in Canberra 💁♀️
Dave W Smith@mhoye What's lost there to people not of a certain age is that she's standing next to Source Code Control. Diffs were done manually by setting inches-thick listings of versions of modules down side-by-side, then flipping through them to eyeball changes and make notes.
Kierkethumbs up convincingly
@Kierkegaanks wtf is this
@mhoye as per alt text, microsoft uses copilot to write code now and their latest update was so thoroughly borked by some margin they had to revoke it at once for lacking necessary files
Я⊛ḶḶ model ☭i can see mackenzie davis playing her in the biopic.
Ed Davies
the gripe ibis@mhoye not very secure, what if she had to pay someone to open the folders for her. for security. and they were stored in a different building.
Kevin Karhan@mhoye because she actually lived #CodeQuality during her career!
- And propably yelling in agony amidst the #Enshittification!
John DetersFrom the 1968 NATO Software Engineering conference (https://static.isthisit.nz/images/2022-08-nato-software-engineering/static/software-engineering-nato-1968.PDF) Djikstra was already seeing the need for change:
"I am convinced that the quality of the product can never be established afterwards. Whether the correctness of a piece of software can be guaranteed or not depends greatly on the structure of the thing made. This means that the ability to convince users, or yourself, that the product is good, is closely intertwined with the design process itself."
aburka 🫣