THE SOFTWARE GENIUS BEHIND THE MOON LANDINGS

What was a day in the life of a NASA computer scientist like during the 1960s?

On the unmanned missions I began writing software mostly in the system software area. We had a lot to do with error detection recovery. My first piece of programming, which we now refer to as ‘software engineering computer science’, or some combination there of, had to do with error detection recovery, because they were worried about unmanned mission aborts – we needed the post-mortem software.

So they [Draper management] thought, ‘We’re going to give it to Margaret, because she’s a beginner and it doesn’t matter if she screws up because that means the mission is aborted anyway, so no big deal’. So I wrote the abort program and I called it ‘Forget It’, because if it didn’t work, it went to post-mortem. Then wouldn’t you know, the very next unmanned mission aborted, and it went to this program called ‘Forget It’. That made an impact on me, even though the people on the project, the engineer guys and everything, said we would never abort because everything was going to run perfectly. That’s when I learned that, when they say it's never going to happen, I shouldn’t believe them, and I always said ‘what