Margaret Hamilton's Real Deliverable Was a 400-Person Team
She led more than 400 engineers writing Apollo's flight software, and that headcount — not the code — is what transferred to every software team since.
history
9 articles tagged “history”.
Margaret Hamilton Died at 90; Software Engineering Outlasted Apollo
Apollo's software lead died on September 30 at 90; the part of her credit that still shows up on an org chart is the discipline.
Fable 5.1 Apparently Cracked a 370-Year-Old Cipher in 44 Minutes
A 370-year-old cryptogram of 64 numbers, solved in 44 minutes by Fable 5.1 — with a hedge in the write-up that makes the claim worth checking.
Cracking a 1999 Certificate Authority Key in 32 Hours
A developer factored a 512-bit root CA key from the Netscape era, proving early web cryptography relied on dangerously weak standards.
Why 27 of 29 Sherman DD Tanks Sank at Omaha Beach
Rough seas sank 27 of 29 Sherman DD tanks at Omaha Beach because their flotation skirts assumed one-foot waves, but D-Day surf reached six feet.
The Last Lighthouse Keepers: How Automation Retired an Entire Profession
Electric lamps, rotating beacons, and remote monitoring removed keepers from the towers one by one over a century, turning a respected maritime job into a symbol of what automation erases.
How a 1975 Clerk Issued America's First Same-Sex Marriage License
A 1975 clerk issued the first U.S. same-sex marriage license by acting at her discretion, while denying a man's request to marry his underage horse.
The Voynich Manuscript: The Book That Has Defeated Every Decoder
A 15th-century book written in an unknown script and filled with botanical and astronomical illustrations has resisted linguists, cryptographers, and machine translation for well over a century.
The Antikythera Mechanism: The Ancient Computer Lost for Two Millennia
A bronze geared computer recovered from an ancient Greek shipwreck predicted eclipses and tracked the calendar, showing how far ahead ancient science ran and how easily that knowledge was lost.