alt Hacker NewsFirst thing I thought of, too. "Who? ...Wait, not the cool book chick!"
Tangential: the software documented in the books next to her were likely developed with a level of rigor that consumer software can only dream of, per the seminal article on similar matters: https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20...
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That is an excellent article and I’d like to read more. Are there other resources about the shuttle software development or projects with a similar level of software engineering?
“Cool book chick”? “Cool book chick”?!?
I’m sorry, I thought this was Hacker News, not Bros R Us. Ms. Hamilton worked on three seminal software projects: Ed Lorenz’s meteorology programs which led to the Lorenz attractor, SAGE, and Apollo. It is hard for me to square your first paragraph with your second, but I’d submit she’s deserving of far more respect than “cool book chick.”
The term she coined for it was "man-rated". Meaning that it had been tested rigorously enough to be trusted to keep humans alive.
During the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldarin pressed a button to display altitude and position during the landing sequence. As it turns out, this was the 8th task the Apollo 11 lander's guidance computer was asked to run, and it was only capable of running 7 tasks in real-time. Thanks to Hamilton and her team's priority scheduler, the guidance computer threw an alarm, killed the lowest priority task, and then resumed the execution of the other 7. If that hadn't been programmed to rescue itself like that, the computer would have crashed, and the Apollo 11 lander would not likely not have been the success that it was.