Specifically, we are looking at the MIT Instrumentation Lab's (later Draper Laboratory) COLOSSUS 2A code for the command module and their LUMINARY 099 code for the lunar module. (COLOSSUS 2A was aka COMANCHE 055, but for obvious reasons, we are using COLOSSUS 2A), Note that to distinguish the two programs, the command module code began with "CO" and the lunar modules code began with "LU".

The source code for COLOSSUS 2A is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ScansForConversion/Comanche055/
The source code for LUMINARY 099 is available at http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ScansForConversion/Luminary099/

The code is written in the native language of the AGC's CPU, AGC Assembly Language, which GitHub observes is difficult to understand. AGC Assembly Language was originally called basic, as opposed to BASIC (which appeared in 1964). The interpreter was called yaYUL. For an early look at the AGC hardware, including how it worked and how it was constructed (with footage of the women who worked on the core rope memory), visit the 1965 MIT Science Reporter TV program coverage. This program’s demonstration of how the astronauts entered instructions into the AGC via the DSKY (display and keyboard) is also of interest in understanding the code.

Much of the early software work was done by Richard Battin, Director, Mission Development, Apollo Guidance And Navigation Program. David Hoag, Director, Apollo Guidance And Navigation Program, has provided extensive credits. He states that "Details of these programs were implemented by a team under the direction of Margaret Hamilton." (Hoag, 1976, 19)

According to Battin (as quoted in Fildes, 2009), the onboard AGC was partially begun because of concern that the Russians might disrupt ground-based communication (This may partly explain why AGC Assembly Language is difficult to decipher).

Because this critique is a part of the Gender and Programming Cultures module, Margaret Hamilton's role, as documented in the code, is of primary interest. Here are suggested approaches:

1. Review some of the code and comments and document where Margaret Hamilton is credited.
To begin with, Hamilton is credited as COLOSSUS Programming Leader in the title page for the COLOSSUS 2A code.

COLOSSUS 2A, p.1
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ScansForConversion/Comanche055/0001
Margaret Hamilton is credited as COLOSSUS Programming Leader

A title page does not seem to be available for LUMNARY 099. Within the code, some segments are credited, and some are not. Documenting credited segments would be useful.

2. Critique comments from a humanist and/or gender perspective.
For instance, in LUMINARY. There is a comment that begins

"HERE IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF GUILDENSTERN:"

Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
appeared in 1966. Is Stoppard's play referred to in this comment?
And how can this comment be interpreted in relationship to the code?

LUMINARY 099, p.800
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ScansForConversion/Luminary099/0800.jpg
"HERE IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF GUILDENSTERN:"

For Instance:

LUMINARY 099, p. 801
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ScansForConversion/Luminary099/0801.jpg
"TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE"

Is the source for this comment Desdemona in Othello?

"These are portents, but yet I hope, I hope
They do not point on me."

How can this be interpreted in relationship to the code?

Much more can be said about the AGC software; any approach or input is welcome!

When referring to specific pages, please include a citation that includes program name and the url of the page (as in the examples above).
If necessary, separate threads can be started.

This is a space for general discussion of the topic -- outside the featured Discussion thread or any topic-specific threads. If a forum member would like to promote any conversation that begins here into its own separate Discussion, please let me know and I can help migrate the material. For an example, see: Sexist Autocomplete: Interventions?

By Elizabeth Losh, Judy Malloy, and Jacqueline Wernimont

Although code purports to be neutral, its binaries speak to deferrals and differences marked by the power and privilege of gender. When Ari Schlesinger asked if there could be a feminist programming language on the HASTAC blog in 2013 (this later became a central thread of CCSWG14), based on experiences with the critical code community, Reddit commenters at The Red Pill attacked her as an opponent of logic and mocked her with satirical guides to pseudocode. By the Fall of 2014 with Gamergate, what Anastasia Salter has called “toxic geek masculinity” went into overdrive with the stalking, doxxing, and swatting of aspiring feminist coders in the game industry and elsewhere. Last year the famed author of “The Google Memo” became an alt-right celebrity by asserting that women might be biologically less competent to succeed in tech-careers and thus were underrepresented (See also his recent lawsuit).

In arguing that women might be inherently worse at software engineering than their male counterparts (as members of a population rather than discrete individuals to be fair to how he qualifies his claims), author James Damore obviously ignores the fact that at one time women dominated the field of computer programming. This is well documented in the research of many scholars -- including Nathan Ensmenger, Marie Hicks, Kate Hayles, and Janet Abbate. Very often these labor histories show a pattern of devaluing the role of female pioneers and suggest that cultural exclusion may be more important factor than Damore would like to admit, which might justify Google's belated inclusion efforts. In particular, Marie Hicks’ recent book on the history of “programmed inequality” suggests that structural factors including government policy and legal frameworks, might propagate bias in technology fields.

Other triumphant historical stories like Hidden Figures suggest reasons for hope, although the film adaptation of the book left out important information described in the original text about the role of Virginia’s campaign of “massive resistance” in a federal workplace, black sororities, black male allies in the NACA/NASA workplace, and the pipeline in black churches to STEM careers. While salutary, the movie version of Hidden Figures also further plays into the notion that programmers, including black women, emerge spontaneously in isolation from their societies. Even in attempting to demonstrate their skill the movie contributed to a cultural mystification of code (think of the dense scribbled blackboards that are unexplained).

What if we examine a specific piece of code composed by a woman doing NASA contract work as a primary text? Judy Malloy suggests that in a thread on “Gendering the Apollo 11 Onboard In-Flight Software”, we start with Margaret Hamilton. Using Margaret Hamilton's work as an example, but also including the work and environments of the women at the NASA Langley Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this thread addresses the role of women programmers in NASA space exploration technology. Primary questions are:

• Have gender and race influenced how NASA’s women programmers were portrayed and credited in the past and in the present?
• Can we identify examples of women programmers at other NASA facilities or contractors?
• How have Margaret Hamilton's ideas about software engineering methods influenced the development of computing environments? How has she been credited, and has her gender resulted in under-crediting?
• How does Hamilton’s experience compare with contemporary experiences of women collaborating in programming environments?

Malloy’s associated code critique, “COLOSSUS and LUMINARY: The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) Code for the Command and Lunar Modules” will review the commented source code, document where Hamilton is credited, and critique comments from a humanist and/or gender perspective.

In seeking to credit pioneers in software engineering like Hamilton, FemTechNet members have encouraged engaging with the Wikipedia community to foster better practices for accounting for otherwise ignored female coders.They have also argued for the importance of people other than programmers in thinking through the history of computer science, including digital artists and animators, as well as those who attended to questions of infrastructure, like the planner who chose the locations for hubs in the national computing infrastructure, Mina Rees, who was often perceived as a secretary despite her doctoral degree and lead position at the Office of Naval Research.

In thinking through how code not only executes but simulates models that reveal the infrastructural conditions of the world, FemTechNet members Liz Losh and Jacque Wernimont have worked with lines in the programming language Processing. Using sample programs from The Nature of Code, which are available to CCSWG members on GitHub, they invite close readers of the algorithms to think about how forces, agents, and environments can be modeled They ask participants in their workshops and institutes to imagine ways that code can simultaneously simulate and represent the challenging circumstances of life lived under patriarchy with its heavy gravities, winding trajectories, and flocking obstacles.

It is in this spirit that we encourage code critiques that are constructive, respectful, generous, and collaborative as we undertake the work of the week together.

I searched "women skiing" but autocomplete serves up women as sex objects and being humiliated for the first four returns. Who is writing these algorithms? Sexism is invisibly baked into so much of our virtual world.

This prompts me to think about the code we can't see, the invisible rules that validate sexism by reinscribing it.

I'm most interested with the relationship between Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton), the android (host) who runs (perhaps a poor choice of words) the local brothel, and her own source code.

First, others have already decided that this code is written in JavaScript React and faux HTML, although I remember an episode where she sees her own dialogue maps as she is talking that resembled language modeling software.

Her radarchart of personality traits has also been simulated.

What do these representations of code say about our conceptions of code?

Needless to say this is a fraught topic. Maeve is an android host built to be a woman of color who runs a brothel -- although I suspect each of those elements were chosen because they were so fraught and to serve up sexual fantasies for a white male-gaze.

That said, I'm still interested in representations of code and the idea of a programmed being's relationship to their code, especially since Maeve seems to oppose her own programming.

See also this article: 10 Things Westworld Gets Wrong about Coding

Of course, I would also like to bring this representation of code to the intersecting explorations of gender, race, and creativity that make up our WG this year.

Navigation and guidance for the Apollo mission were controlled by the AGC Software, under contract to the MIT Instrumentation Lab (later the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, where Hamilton was Director of the Software Engineering Division). Awarded in August 1961, this was the first Apollo Program contract that NASA issued. At the time of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, Hamilton had led the onboard in-flight software team since 1965.

This thread will focus on Margaret Hamilton's role as director for the AGC onboard in-flight software and on her use and development of software engineering methods in this project. We will also address the role of women programmers in NASA missions. Although there were glass ceilings, for instance, the 1960's rejection of the Mercury 13 woman astronauts (Ackmann, 2003); extraordinary work was done by black women mathematicians/computer programmers at NASA Langley, including Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson (Shetterly, 2016), as well as by the women mathematicians and computer programmers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), including Barby Canright, Susan Finley, Janez Lawson, Helen Ling, Sylvia Lundy, Barbara Paulson, and Victoria Wang (Holt, 2016).

Hamilton's role as programming leader for the onboard in-flight software and specifically for the COLOSSUS software, is documented by the source code uploaded to GitHub by Chris Garry. The title page is as follows:

#************************************************************************
#                                                                       *
#       THIS AGC PROGRAM SHALL ALSO BE REFERRED TO AS:                  *
#                                                                       *
#                                                                       *
#               COLOSSUS 2A                                             *
#                                                                       *
#                                                                       *
#   THIS PROGRAM IS INTENDED FOR USE IN THE CM AS SPECIFIED             *
#   IN REPORT R-577.  THIS PROGRAM WAS PREPARED UNDER DSR               *
#   PROJECT 55-23870, SPONSORED BY THE MANNED SPACECRAFT                *
#   CENTER OF THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE                        *
#   ADMINISTRATION THROUGH CONTRACT NAS 9-4065 WITH THE                 *
#   INSTRUMENTATION LABORATORY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF              *
#   TECHNOLOGY, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.                                        *
#                                                                       *
#************************************************************************


SUBMITTED:  MARGARET H. HAMILTON        DATE:   28 MAR 69
    M.H.HAMILTON, COLOSSUS PROGRAMMING LEADER
    APOLLO GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION

APPROVED:   DANIEL J. LICKLY        DATE:   28 MAR 69
    D.J.LICKLY, DIRECTOR, MISSION PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT
    APOLLO GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION PROGRAM

APPROVED:   FRED H. MARTIN          DATE:   28 MAR 69
    FRED H. MARTIN, COLOSSUS PROJECT MANAGER
    APOLLO GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION PROGRAM

APPROVED:   NORMAN E. SEARS         DATE:   28 MAR 69
    N.E. SEARS, DIRECTOR, MISSION DEVELOPMENT
    APOLLO GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION PROGRAM

APPROVED:   RICHARD H. BATTIN       DATE:   28 MAR 69
    R.H. BATTIN, DIRECTOR, MISSION DEVELOPMENT
    APOLLO GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION PROGRAM

APPROVED:   DAVID G. HOAG           DATE:   28 MAR 69
    D.G. HOAG, DIRECTOR
    APOLLO GUIDANCE AND NAVIGATION PROGRAM

APPROVED:   RALPH R. RAGAN          DATE:   28 MAR 69
    R.R. RAGAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR
 INSTRUMENTATION LABORATORY

The number of people working on Apollo 11 software is estimated as 350 (Hoag, 1976) . The size and the team nature of the project have led to various ways of crediting, and until recently much documentation has favored the men. (That there was at least one other woman on Hamilton’s AGC team is confirmed by Time, (Rothman, 2015). Identifying other women on her team is of interest.

This thread will also explore “software engineering”: how it applies to Hamilton's work and her influence on contemporary computing. Her use of a software engineering approach in the AGC project and her coining of the term are documented. (McMillan, 2015, Rayl, 2008, and Hamilton, 2008). However, the Wikipedia entry on Software Engineering does not mention her.

The code for the AGC and its keyboard and display interface (DSKY) is written in AGC assembly language, which GitHub observes is difficult to understand. We will address the code in a separate code critique: “COLOSSUS and LUMINARY: The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) Code” (and, if needed, in additional threads). These critique(s) will address authoring language and code, as well as use of commented code in the Command Module COLOSSUS 2A code and the Lunar Module LUMINARY 099 code. A few of the programmers’ comments are listed on Slate (Smith, 2016).

The hardware for the AGC was under the direction of Raytheon, where a group of women worked on the core rope memory (Fildes, 2009). Fairchild was the contractor for the microchips, and in the course of the Apollo mission, the 75 AGCs that were built, each used 5,000 microchips. In The Innovators, Isaacson (2014) observes that the first chip for the AGC cost $1000, but over the course of the Apollo mission and other government projects that utilized microchips, the price went down to $20 apiece, opening the market for solid-state consumer products. What the AGC hardware looked like, how it worked, and how it was constructed (including footage of the women who worked on the core rope memory) is documented in a 1965 MIT Science Reporter TV program.

This discussion welcomes input on Hamilton's role as project director for the onboard in-flight software; on her creation of a software engineering environment; and on the role of women programmers in the creation of NASA software. Using her work as an example, but also including the work and environments of the women at the NASA Langley Research Center and JPL, we will address the role of women programmers in NASA space exploration. Primary questions are:

• Have gender and race influenced how NASA’s women programmers were portrayed and credited in the past and in the present?
• Can we identify examples of women programmers at other NASA facilities or contractors?
• How have Margaret Hamilton's ideas about software engineering environments influenced the development of computing? How has she been credited, and has her gender resulted in under-crediting?
• How does Hamilton’s experience compare with contemporary experiences of women collaborating in programming environments?