https://medium.com/@verne/margaret-hamilton-the-engineer-who...
She gives some general insight to how the code works, but the biggest highlight for me was how she apparently coined the term "software engineering":
> Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering; and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science. I had always believed that both art and science were involved in its creation, but at that time most thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term “software engineering” to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering; yet, treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.
Apparently, she's kept off of the social network grid, but would love if someone could convince her to do an AMA.
(If you are going to down vote this comment, can you please take a moment to explain why?)
The contributions of Hamilton and Hopper during that era suggests to me that when things are new, they are undervalued, and that undervalued professions and undervalued people have a way of finding each other and doing great things.
One of the stories is of a male manager who, after being put in charge of a team of software developers, asks his wife not to tell any of their friends he was managing a software team.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spacefli...
Generally, any comment or story on HN that suggests the presence of sexism in the world of software gets downvoted/flagged. Your account is almost a year old so I'm surprised you didn't know this. :)
Should we just say that all the sexist women went to the teacher profession and pushed out the men, and all the sexist men went to the programming profession and pushed out the women? One thing seem for sure, only recruiting from half the population seem to cause a problem for both the teacher and programming profession.
Interestingly, Steve Wozniak would come up with a similar solution for the Apple II about a decade later:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
SWEET16 is an interpreted byte-code language invented by Steve Wozniak and implemented as part of the Integer BASIC ROM in the Apple II series of computers. It was created because Wozniak needed to manipulate 16-bit pointer data in his implementation of BASIC, and the Apple II was an 8-bit computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Code_%28computer_languag...
Going back further, Turing's 1936 Universal Machine is "universal" because it can interpret a description of another machine, which could be a different Universal Machine (i.e. an interpreter), an application-specific machine, or even the same universal machine (i.e. self-emulation).
Gates and Allen developed Altair BASIC on a PDP-10 at Harvard in 1976, handling invalid-instruction traps by emulating the 8080 instructions they were using, thus turning the PDP-10's operating system into an interpreter for a different instruction set.
The Alto being used at the same time at Xerox PARC was optimized for such emulations: it ran "microcode" loaded from RAM, so that you could program it to interpret whatever instruction set was most appropriate for your application.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a large fraction of IBM computer time was spent running emulators of earlier IBM models like the 650, 704, 709, and 7090, in order to run the software developed for those older machines.
And of course today much of our computer time is spent running software represented as JVM bytecodes, SpiderMonkey bytecodes https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Sp..., CPython bytecodes, or Lua "bytecodes"; and Vulkan, the new replacement for OpenGL, defines a vendor-independent bytecode format for representing GPU programs.
A level below this, the currently popular out-of-order CPUs recompile the i386 or amd64 instructions emitted by our compilers into sets of "micro-ops", which are then independently scheduled; sometimes these micro-op representations are cached so that the recompilation process doesn't have to be repeated every time through a loop. You could argue that this, even more than the usual microcode approach that was supposed to go out the window with the advent of RISC, has turned our entire software infrastructure into bytecode for a more convenient virtual machine.
Your comment seems to be predicated on the misconception that programming a computer to interpret a more convenient instruction set is some kind of bizarre or unusual thing to do. In fact, it is not only commonplace, but absolutely central to our modern concept of "computer".
If my dim memory of Knuth's article on the early history of compilers is right, Short Code was meant more for programmer productivity than code size.
Vulcan's SPIR-V, however, is more like a compiler's intermediate format than an ISA to be interpreted by either a program or hardware. It's probably more similar to AS/400's TIMI encoding in how it's supposed to work.
(Also, the mention of SWEET16 and the way of making parts of low-level programs more palatable reminded of the invention of Forth in late 1950s/early 1960s as well.)
$ awk '/# Page / { print $3 }' Apollo-11/*.s | sort -gr | head -1
1516
In any case it's doubtful a single program spanning the whole pile could fit in the AGC rom.
> Q: Was this picture taken during the Apollo project development? When was it taken and who took it?
> A: Here is a description of the photo excerpted from an MIT Draper Lab document:
> > “Taken by the Draper Lab photographer in 1969 (during Apollo 11). Here, Margaret is shown standing beside listings of the software developed by the team she was in charge of, the LM and CM on-board flight software team”.
Hamilton again, in this Vox interview (http://www.vox.com/2015/5/30/8689481/margaret-hamilton-apoll...):
> "In this picture, I am standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code," Hamilton says in an email. "To clarify, there are no other kinds of printouts, like debugging printouts, or logs, or what have you, in the picture."
Such sheets would look like this: http://www.eah-jena.de/~kleine/history/software/IBM360-codin...
And would likely be much less dense than the printouts.
[1] Steve Dolha on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Was-this-pile-of-code-written-by-a-sin...
[2] This imgur post: https://www.quora.com/Was-this-pile-of-code-written-by-a-sin...
EDIT: I bet he awk'd it before the repo split the files up; each is more than 1,400 pages. The total number is likely closer to 3,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Machines#Part_3:_the_navi...
They are available on public torrent sites.
