Friday, April 15, 2005

Meeting with Margaret Hamilton

Yesterday I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting with Margaret Hamilton. It is very rare in life that you get to meet with a true visionary; rarer still that her level of vision has remained at a constant high for over forty years, and rarer still that this person is warm and fun to talk to.

We discussed her roles as a female leading a team of over one hundred people in the sixties, her role on Apollo, her team, the software, what she does today, and several other topics. At one point, I realized she was describing the Object-Oriented Analysis and Design process...which she did in the Sixties! They called it something else ("modular" code in an end-to-end process, etc.), but, as they say, "A rose by any other name..."

We spoke for ninety minutes, and I could have kibbutzed all day. I eventually let her off the hook. (Especially because I needed to come home and write up my paper on the interview.) =)

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