As I See It: The Forgotten Ones

January 27, 2025 Victor Rozek

It was the old black-and-white photo that first captured my attention: A woman standing next to a stack of thick folders containing green-bar printer paper that stretched from the floor to just above her head. In the photo she is smiling and appears to be balancing the unsteady tower. The year is 1969, the woman is Margaret Hamilton, and she has good reason to smile.

Eight years prior, she worked at the MIT Lincoln Lab, a research and development facility funded by the Department of Defense. There, she worked on something called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project. MIT was trying to develop a prototype computer system for the Air Force which could locate and identify enemy aircraft. Without much success.

When she got to the lab, the system was inoperable, in part perhaps because the person who wrote it, according to Hamilton, “took delight in the fact that all of his comments were in Greek and Latin.” (It’s hard to fathom the intent behind the use of dead languages but, presumably, if the nation was ever attacked by Greek or Roman aircraft, we’d be prepared.)

As was the custom at the lab, when you joined the organization as a beginner, you were assigned to a program which nobody was yet able to successfully run. “It was tricky programming,” remembered Hamilton, but she not only got it to work, it even printed out answers in Latin and Greek (in addition to English)! Which may be how she got the attention of NASA.

In 1965 she joined the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which would develop the Apollo Guidance Computer, essential to the first lunar landing. Hamilton, in fact, was the first programmer and the first female hired for the Apollo project at MIT. She later became Director of the Software Engineering Division.

And, according to her Wikipedia bio: “She was responsible for the team writing and testing all on-board in-flight software for the Apollo spacecraft’s Command and Lunar Module and for the subsequent Skylab space station.”

The reason she is smiling in the picture, is because the enormous stack of printouts represents the totality of the code written by Hamilton and her team for what was arguably the most significant accomplishment in American history. Yet very few people even know her name.

It’s one of the ironies of the IT profession that computer code runs the world, but the coders who create it are largely anonymous.

Just over 25 years ago, Americans were highly apprehensive about the so-called Y2K bug. With the impending century change, computers, using a two-digit date format, were widely predicted to fail. The closer to the turn of the century, the more dramatic the predictions: Hospitals would shut down, financial systems would fail, transportation systems would come to a screeching halt, and government services such as social security would be disrupted.

Political historian Heather Cox Richardson writes: Newspaper tabloids ran headlines that convinced some worried people to start stockpiling food and preparing for societal collapse: “JANUARY 1, 2000: THE DAY THE EARTH WILL STAND STILL!” one tabloid read. “ALL BANKS WILL FAIL. FOOD SUPPLIES WILL BE DEPLETED! ELECTRICITY WILL BE CUT OFF! THE STOCK MARKET WILL CRASH! VEHICLES USING COMPUTER CHIPS WILL STOP DEAD! TELEPHONES WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION! DOMINO EFFECT WILL CAUSE A WORLDWIDE DEPRESSION!”

But January 1, 2000, came and went with barely a ripple. It turns out, as Richardson reminds us, that technology teams had been working on the problem for years, “racing to meet the deadline.” Researchers estimate that the cost of all that programming ranged between $300 billion to $600 billion! Nor was the task in any way trivial. Richardson recounts: “The head of the Federal Aviation Administration at the time, Jane Garvey, told NPR in 1998 that the air traffic control system had twenty-three million lines of code that had to be fixed.”

It was not a coincidence that 1998 was the peak year for the AS/400 platform in terms of customer base size (275,000 unique customers) and revenues many, many times larger than today. Thousands of mainframe shops moved to AS/400s, and thousands of other customers on other platforms moved to AS/400s. And those already on the AS/400 platform bought extra capacity to do their Y2K projects.

Still, is spite of the vast financial commitment and the expertise of the programming community, sensationalistic fiction ruled the day. “Crises,” notes Richardson, “get a lot of attention, but the quiet work of fixing them gets less.” In the end, the Y2K crisis was dismissed as a histrionic overreaction; the programming community that averted the crisis, was barely acknowledged.

More recently, an entire subgroup of IT professionals who had been largely ignored, are suddenly in the spotlight. But purely for narcissistic reasons. The tug-of-war in the incoming administration over H-1B visas promises to sacrifice people to political expediency one way or another. At issue are contradictory policy promises made to separate factions of Trump supporters.

Initially, President Trump was vociferously against the H-1B program, promising to eliminate it, and insisting that the jobs would go to American workers. But many industries are experiencing shortages of skilled labor. And, as soon as the Tech Bros started greasing the political skids, suddenly President Trump was singing the praises of H-1B.

Critics have long had issues with the program because, they say, it’s exploitative. It allows corporations to hire foreign workers at lower pay levels than comparable U.S. workers, and essentially traps them in their job. It’s risky to quit under H-1B provisions. If you don’t find another job within two months you can be deported. Critics note that the program unfairly favors employers, and that wage theft is rampant.

As if to prove their point, Elon Musk lamented the financial difficulty of hiring Americans. “Investing in Americans is actually hard,” said the richest man in the world. “Really hard. It costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It’s a short term net loss. It’s much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite as good a job, but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here.”

All this leaves highly skilled foreign software engineers at the mercy of a lose-lose scenario: They will either see the H-1B program terminated and be deported; or they will likely be forced to work for a fraction of a fair wage.

The achievements and contributions of the IT community remain, to a large extent, unknown and under-appreciated. Such is the nature of the work, and the level of user entitlement that expects software to work perfectly first time, every time.

For those who have been feeling forgotten, ignored, or misused, know that at least some of us see and appreciate you.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search